I had a real problem today with remote desktop shortcut keys. There is a nice and easy way to access a computer at home and that is through RDP. One of the problems with RDP, also known as Remote Desktop is that when you are logged into a remote machine you lose access to some of those keyboard shortcuts that you really need. Today this happened to me and it took me much longer than it should have to find the answer.
The problem that I had was that I had used remote desktop to get into my machine at home from work and it was kind of broken. I could not access the desktop and right clicking on the desktop did not do anything. What I needed to do was reboot the computer. If I am at a computer I can hit the Ctrl+alt+delete keys and get a task manager or a shutdown/logoff screen. Of course using RDP if I did this I would be logging off my local machine. Instead I had to find the key combinations to affect the remote machine instead.
Remote Desktop Shortcut Keys
| ALT+PAGE UP | Switches between programs from left to right. |
| ALT+PAGE DOWN | Switches between programs from right to left. |
| ALT+INSERT | Cycles through the programs in the order they were started. |
| ALT+HOME | Displays the Start menu. |
| CTRL+ALT+BREAK | Switches the client between a window and full screen. |
| CTRL+ALT+END | Brings up the Windows Security dialog box. |
| ALT+DELETE | Displays the Windows menu. |
| CTRL+ALT+Minus (-) symbol on the numeric keypad | Places a snapshot of the active window, within the client, on the Terminal server clipboard (provides the same functionality as pressing PrintScrn on a local computer.) |
| CTRL+ALT+Plus (+) symbol on the numeric keypad | Places a snapshot of the entire client window area on the Terminal server clipboard (provides the same functionality as pressing ALT+PrintScrn on a local computer.) |
You can see here that all I needed to do in the end was hit Ctrl+alt+end and I was able to get to the task manager and reboot the remote computer.
I find that we rely on the mouse a little too much sometimes and there is a real problem that the mouse is more of an addon to the computer and especially in cases like this where we have trouble with the mouse in looking for remote desktop shortcut keys we don’t really know what to do. Keep this info at hand in your favorites becasue as you can imagine you need it when you least expect it.
Have you run into these problems looking for remote desktop shortcut keys, let us know?
