Tag Archives: RDC

RDC, DPI, and You

I recently became the proud owner of a Lenovo Yoga X1. This replaced my generation Lenovo X1 Carbon, which is only being retired because of some wonky video connections on the mini-DP port. Fine box otherwise even after three years.

One of the new features of the Yoga X1 – and there have been a bunch I didn’t even know about, like the Wacom-based pen! – is the extremely high resolution display at 2560×1440. While I love the concept of having so many lines of resolution, the laptop still have a 14″-or so screen, which means you almost have to start messing around with the font size, aka DPI. Being able to change the DPI value has been in Windows for a while, like I think Windows 95 or maybe even Windows 3.1. For decades I’ve left it alone. You see, for DPI to be useful, applications have to support it. In more modern applications – think .NET 2.0 and newer – this Just Works but for older apps it’s one of those things developers were supposed to do but almost never bothered with. Like bidi text or help systems.

With modern boxes with uber-big resolutions, keeping the DPI at 100% is nearly impossible. I’ve run 1920×1080 on a 15″ display with DPI set to 100% but trying to do 2560×1440 on a 14″ display isn’t going to work. The worst part of this is how the DPI changes have been impacting my Remote Desktop Connections.

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Vista: Custom RDP Resolutions

I’ve been using a custom resolution for Remote Desktop connections between my old notebook (1400×1050) and desktop PC’s (often 1600×1200) because I want to make full use of the space that I have, on the screen that I’m currently on. Why not take advantage of my wider screen notebook, when remoting into a PC?

The tricky part to this is that you have to edit the RDP file directly, using notepad. For the most part, I don’t recommend editing the entire file this way, but you certainly can try different resolutions by tweaking desktopwidth and desktopheight… hit and miss thing, that. If you have any reservations about this stick to the UI!

The other part of the tweaking comes into play when working with the window position.
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