Windows – Enable remote desktop or remote administration remotely

remote accessremote desktopwindows 7windows 8

I recently reformatted one of my computers and had forgotten to turn on Remote Desktop. Now I am trying to grab some files off that computer, but I have no way of accessing it. I have an administrative account and can access the local network (remote desktop another computer that is on the network), but I can't figure out how too enable remote desktop or administration.

I found this post promising, but since remote administration wasn't on I wasn't able to enable Remote Desktop.

How can I enable Remote Desktop on a Windows 8 computer from another Windows 7 computer on the same local network?

Best Answer

The post you linked mentioned using PSEXEC from the Sysinternals Suite. Assuming you have valid admin credentials for the remote machine and can talk to it over the network, then it should work fine for running commands and applications on the machine.

Another post shows how to edit the required registry key via the command line. You can use PSEXEC to run that command on the remote computer. This would look like:

psexec \\<computer name or ip address> -u <username> -p <password> reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server" /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

The remote PC will need to be rebooted too, as always PSEXEC can handle that too:

psexec \\<computer name or ip address> -u <username> -p <password> shutdown -r -t 0
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