Another quick Windows question

I'm still looking at various remote access options, but today I have
wasted hours on this dreadful IBM (never, ever, ever again - no wonder
they sold to Lenovo) laptop. No recover or XP Pro CD with the machine,
just the option to blow it back to Service pack 0 from the large hidden
wasted area of the hard drive, or use one of my Ghost images and hope.

But it is probably my fault in conjunction with Microsoft.

On every other machine here I get a menu option for the Remote Desktop
Client in Start-> All Programs->Accessories->Communications. On this
laptop Communications doesn't include it.

I found the service and started it, but that didn't seem to get me very
far. I went online to download and install the XP client. Halfway
through the installation it stopped, saying it was already there and
telling me to look at the above path. Still not there.

I went into the Start options, found the Remote Desktop, and tried to
put it back, but Communications doesn't appear under the Accessories
options, just Games etc. I've made a new program group and put the
option in there, but it makes the machine not terribly standard.

So, how do I get my program menus back to the standard state?

 

On mine, the "Remote Desktop Connection" link points to:

%SystemRoot%\system32\mstsc.exe

.... so just create a shortcut ...

-- Graham

 

Thanks, Graham. That is more or less what I did.

However, I now think, in view of what someone else has told me happened
on his machine, that what actually happened was that....

I installed the server bit of remote desktop on this machine. I'm told
that this has the effect of moving the shortcut from the start menu onto
the desktop.

I thought that, in my thrashing around, trying to install the client,
I'd added the shortcut to the desktop as well as to the Communications
bit of the start menu. But maybe it floated there all on its own.

As is obvious, none of this is important, and yet again I've revealed
how little I understand Microsoft's thinking.

 

As far as I know, you don't have to install anything. The server component
is present, but you have to enable the functionality in Control Panel |
System | Remote - tick "Allow users to connect remotely to this computer" -
and look at the firewall settings to ensure you have the correct access.
Clearly this is for the target machine that you wish to control - which has
to be XP or a server OS, it's not present in Windows 2000 workstation or
anything earlier.

For the client you run mstsc.exe using whatever shortcut is available or you
have configured.

Test it from one machine to another on a LAN.