Following its old fashion of removing features from ‘Home’ versions of Windows, Microsoft stripped Windows 10 Home of quite a lot of advanced features. One of those features is the Remote Desktop functionality.
Now sure you can just go for a third-party alternative instead (something which we’ll talk about at the end of this article) but the ease and integration of a built-in tool are almost always better than a third-party alternative.
For those of you looking for a workaround to get Remote Desktop working on your ‘Home’ edition of Windows, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’re going to take a look at how you can enable Remote Desktop in Windows 10 Home.
Keep in mind that while the process itself isn’t illegal, you will be breaching the Microsoft Windows EULA. We recommend you do not use this method in a commercial setting.
Also read: How to enable Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) in Windows 10?
How to enable Remote Desktop
To enable this feature, we’re going to use the RDP Wrapper library written by GitHub user binaryuser.
You can download the RDP Wrapper library here
Step 1: Once you’ve downloaded the library, extract it to a location of your choice.
Step 2: You’ll see a bunch of files. Run install.bat with administrator privileges. Wait for the process to finish.
Step 3: Next up, we’re going to have to run update.bat with the same administrator privileges as before.
Step 4: At this point in time you have already enabled the Remote Desktop protocol, which means that Windows Remote Desktop should work just fine on your PC now.
To check this, run the RDPConf.exe program from the zip folder. You should see something similar to this.
And that’s it. You can now use Remote Desktop on your PC just fine. However, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.
- You can log in using the same username/password as your user account.
- Make sure that your Firewall allows TCP and UDP port number 3389.
- This one is a bit obvious, but don’t give remote access to random people.
Also read: Top 7 Snipping Tool alternatives for Windows
Troubleshooting Listener State error
It’s possible that after doing the aforementioned process, you might get an error in your Listener State. If it shows up as not listening, here’s what you can do to fix it.
Step 1: Start the command prompt as administrator and type in the following:
net stop termservice
Step 2: Head over to C:/Program Files/ RDP Wrapper and find the RDPWrap.ini file.
Step 3: Append the following code to the file.
[10.0.18362.657] LocalOnlyPatch.x86=1 LocalOnlyOffset.x86=B7D06 LocalOnlyCode.x86=jmpshort LocalOnlyPatch.x64=1 LocalOnlyOffset.x64=82FB5 LocalOnlyCode.x64=jmpshort SingleUserPatch.x86=1 SingleUserOffset.x86=50535 SingleUserCode.x86=nop SingleUserPatch.x64=1 SingleUserOffset.x64=0DBFC SingleUserCode.x64=Zero DefPolicyPatch.x86=1 DefPolicyOffset.x86=50269 DefPolicyCode.x86=CDefPolicy_Query_eax_ecx DefPolicyPatch.x64=1 DefPolicyOffset.x64=1FE15 DefPolicyCode.x64=CDefPolicy_Query_eax_rcx SLInitHook.x86=1 SLInitOffset.x86=5A77A SLInitFunc.x86=New_CSLQuery_Initialize SLInitHook.x64=1 SLInitOffset.x64=22DDC SLInitFunc.x64=New_CSLQuery_Initialize [10.0.18362.657-SLInit] bInitialized.x86 =D577C bServerSku.x86 =D5780 lMaxUserSessions.x86 =D5784 bAppServerAllowed.x86 =D578C bRemoteConnAllowed.x86=D5790 bMultimonAllowed.x86 =D5794 ulMaxDebugSessions.x86=D5798 bFUSEnabled.x86 =D579C bInitialized.x64 =F6A8C bServerSku.x64 =F6A90 lMaxUserSessions.x64 =F6A94 bAppServerAllowed.x64 =F6A9C bRemoteConnAllowed.x64=F6AA0 bMultimonAllowed.x64 =F6AA4 ulMaxDebugSessions.x64=F6AA8 bFUSEnabled.x64 =F6AAC
Step 4: Start the service again by typing.
net start termservice
You can read more about this issue here.
Remote Desktop alternatives for Windows
If for some reason you can’t wrap your head around or prefer using a third-party option, here are a few alternatives that work really well.
Also read: How to login as administrator in Windows 10?
