Can no longer rdp into Windows 10 box

Question

As in the title. My basic setup is that I am visiting my parents, and left my Windows 10 box at home running with RDP enabled. This has worked fine for five days, but this evening, I can no longer remote in.

Just to be clear, there's a couple of differentiating factors here.

• Remoting in to Windows 10 instead of 2003/7. A lot of the causes seem to be things like misapplied Windows 7 updates or SP1 which obviously don't apply.
• No other remote access. A lot of the suggested solutions involve things like rebooting the remote machine. If I can't remote desktop in, I have no timely remote access, so I effectively cannot affect the remote machine to resolve the problem.

The symptoms however are pretty familiar. From my Windows 7 laptop, which is the client, I enter the IP of the box, my credentials, etc etc. The dialog goes through all the stages as normal, e.g. configuring connection, securing remote session, configuring remote session, etc. However at the end of the process, instead of a remote session, or an error or anything else, I am simply dumped back to the start screen.

How can I resume remoting in to the server?

Answer 1

It might be that you have a running RDP session, and the IP address that you are transiting out from your parents has changed. It might be that some part of RDP has crashed on your computer, or some other process is consuming all of your system resources.

You try the /admin and /console switches to force yourself on, but that functionality is supposed to have been removed with new versions of Windows.

You could try to force yourself on with the default Administrator user if you have activated that account, or try another user account if you have another one with remote access privileges activated.

Have you simply port forwarded a port from your router to your Windows 10 box, or do you have a more robust (and secure) connection to the network that you Windows 10 system is sitting on, like a VPN connection?

The reason I ask, if the RDP port is the only thing open to you, then you are pretty much stuffed until you can get back to look at your system. If you have a VPN then you could use the shutdown command to restart your computer.

shutdown /m \\computername /f /r /t 00