Last week I wrote a post on how to enable remote desktop on remote computer through remote registry, but as I said at the end of that post, you need to be either administrator or be in the remote desktop group on the remote computer in order to login interactively. if you are not administrator or are not in the remote desktop group you most likely will get this message when trying to login onto the remote computer:

Logon Message-remote computer login

so how do you add yourself or users to those groups remotely? first of all, you need to be a domain admin to do this, right-click My Computer and go to Manage:

computer manage

once you get to the “Computer management console” click on Action and choose “Connect to another computer:

Connect to another computer

On the Select computer window type the computer name or IP address of the computer you want to connect to and click OK:

Select Computer

immediately after you click OK on the above window, you should get back to the computer management console, but now instead of displaying local resources of your computer, it should be the remote computer resources; hence the name of the remote computer on the computer management console:

Computer management console remote

Expand “Local Users and Groups” by clicking on the + sign and select groups:

Remote desktop group

Double click “Remote Desktop Users” on the left hand side list, and the remote desktop users properties should pop-up:

Remote Desktop Users Properties

click on the Add button, then on the screen that shows up type the username that you want to add to the remote desktop user group, click on Check Names and then click OK.

click Apply and OK on all other windows and close out of the computer management console. you will need to do the same process for the administrators group.

now you should be able to login remotely to the computer with the username you specified here. in the next post, I will show you how to tweak remote desktop to make fast remote connections.