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ClearType in Remote Desktop For Vista And Longhorn

Tuesday, 12 September 2006 by Michel Roth

One of the many new features Vista brings to Remote Desktop is ClearType support. Turn it on, you may be surprised at how much nicer the screen looks with fonts rendered in ClearType. (If you’re not sure what ClearType is and why you should care, you may want to check out ClearType information for a better explanation than I can give.)

To turn it on, simply start up ‘Remote Desktop Connection,’ click the Options button and go over the to the ‘Experience’ tab. There along with such stalwarts as ‘Menu and window animation’ you’ll see two new checkboxes, one for ‘Font smoothing’ and one for ‘Desktop composition.’ Select ‘Font smoothing’ and TS to a Vista machine. This only works when you connect to a computer running Vista or Longhorn Server. The client OS can be Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, or Vista but you must be running the updated ‘Remote Desktop Client’ in order to get the checkbox.

In other words these checkboxes effectively mean ‘If possible, follow the settings the user would get if they were logging in locally.’ If a user doesn’t like ClearType and turned it off on their desktop, it wouldn’t get turned on automatically just because that user was coming in remotely with the ‘Font smoothing’ checkbox selected. One aspect of this approach is that if a someone uses standard font smoothing when they work locally, then that is what they will get remotely. Hence we decided to be strictly accurate and label the checkbox ‘Allow font smoothing.’

How bad is the performance hit? Depending on the scenario, the increase in bytes sent over the wire can be quite significant. In the final analysis it all comes down to what the user feels is an acceptable tradeoff. From my own experience I connect to my desktop at work over a cable modem using Terminal Services Gateway every morning and I always turn on ClearType. I type about sixty words a minute and the performance is fine.

On the other hand, if you are an administrator of a server that’s sitting behind a slow WAN link, then the end-user tradeoff isn’t the important factor. Since that same line is shared by multiple services and multiple users, you care more about aggregate bandwidth usage of the server. For this scenario we are planning on making the server side configurable with group policy.

Read this and more in the original article at the Terminal Services Team Blog.