Many times throughout my projects, I find it necessary to enable remote desktop on machines that I do not have console access to – usually because I myself am working remotely on the customer.

While there has always been the method of editing the registry remotely to enable Remote Desktop, this method requires the server to be rebooted. So, what’s the method to avoid server downtime?

The answer is powershell.

(Get–WmiObject Win32_TerminalServiceSetting -Computername ServerNameHere –Namespace root\cimv2\TerminalServices).SetAllowTsConnections(1,1) | Out–Null

(Get–WmiObject –Class “Win32_TSGeneralSetting” -Computername ServerNameHere –Namespace root\cimv2\TerminalServices –Filter “TerminalName=’RDP-tcp'”).SetUserAuthenticationRequired(0) | Out–Null

This will immediately enable Remote Desktop on the specified server.