Remote Desktop on Vista Home – No Solution

I was watching my daughter today and decided to use my laptop in the kitchen to keep a better eye on her. I thought I would just enable Remote Desktop Access on my new desktop running Vista Home Premium and remote in. That’s when the shock began. The only thing available in Vista Basic is Remote Access – i.e. issuing a ticket to someone to remote control the computer. It does not have a remote desktop server!

So I hit the net in search of an answer. Surely Microsoft would not be dense enough to remove remote access from Vista, right? Sure enough, those morons took it out of Vista Basic and left it from Vista Business and Ultimate users. Now I can’t think of a stupider thing to do as far as remote connectivity goes.

What’s left is for users of Vista Home to either upgrade (not going to happen on this baby-budget), or find a work around. There are some VNC solutions that half work, but my biggest concern with this is security. RDP is an encrypted, well performing protocol and it protects users. People who need remote desktop access and go with a VNC solution without realizing that it is not encrypted are asking for trouble.

So once again Microsoft chose profit over security and I hope they have to answer for this. The large corporate users are the ones with IT shops to help protect their desktops, while the people using Vista Home are more likely not to have this support and thus be more vulnerable to security problems.