RDP session won't fill the screen when I drag it from my 17" monitor to my 22"

Question

I have a windows 8.1 PC setup with two monitors, my main monitor is 22" and the second a 17". I sometimes have Multiple RDP sessions open on my computer at once. Every time I open an RDP session it automatically opens on my 17" monitor, which is okay.

Whats annoying is if I drag the session over to my main (22") screen it won't go "full screen". When I drag it over to my bigger screen and hit "maximize" it will never fill the whole screen, it just stays the same size as it was on the smaller monitor.

Any ideas why it won't get bigger than the 17" screen even when on the bigger screen? (every other program I've used does)

Or something else that might work is if there was a way to make the session's "default" screen my main screen? I want to keep my bigger screen set as my main screen though.

Answer 1

Once you establish a connection to a server, it sets the resolution of that session to what the client has. This prohibits you from changing the resolution when going to a different monitor, because technically it still has the same resolution on the remote side.

If you were to change the screen resolution on the remote side, the RDP session would then resize. Except that this is not allowed for terminal server sessions.

So what you want to do is start the RDP connection on the biggest screen. Note that if you move it to the smaller screen you will have scrollbars while windowed. By clicking on the icon in the upper left, and then from the menu select "Smart sizing", it will stretch the window and the scrollbar is gone.