My father-in-law called me today and mentioned he was going out of town and wanted a way to manage his email within Outlook so he doesn’t come back with a thousand pieces of spam in his inbox. Simple enough request right? Not really. Apparently Microsoft actually believes that “home” users will not need remote access to their own machines. This is obviously not the case I have detailed one above, and I’m sure there are plenty more. However, in a need to differentiate their products to justify charging more, they must remove certain features from certain versions. Thus, the lack of remote access on home versions of Windows.

Windows Vista Home (and XP for that matter) does not actually allow for incoming Remote Desktop connections. The Remote Desktop software is installed and you can connect to other machines, but by default, you can’t accept incoming connections. In addition, remote connections are disabled by default on Windows Vista. However, after some searching, I came across a site detailing how to enable incoming Remote Desktop connections.
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