Windows: Cannot Establish Remote Desktop Connection Using Non-Administrator Account

Cannot Establish Remote Desktop Connection Using Non-Administrator Account.

By default Windows XP and Windows 7 allow the users on the remote computers establish remote desktop connection only using the administrator account of the remote computers. This means that while establishing remote desktop connection to the remote computer, users must provide the administrator’s username and password for the remote computer when prompted.

Although this default nature of Windows operating system has been designed to protect the computer from unauthorised accesses, it can be a big problem when the non-administrator users want to access the remote computers for some obvious reasons.

Since only the administrator account is allowed to accept the remote desktop connection requests from the remote computers, the default Windows operating systems configuration must be modified accordingly so that even the non-administrator user accounts can establish the remote desktop (sometimes also referred to as RDP) connections to the remote computers.

In order to do so, the non-administrative user account that has to be allowed to accept the remote desktop connections must be added to the Remote Desktop Users group that is automatically created when Windows is installed. As soon as the target non-administrative user account is added to the Remote Desktop Users group, it can start allowing the incoming RDP requests from the remote computers when the correct username and password is provided when prompted.

In order to add the non-administrative user account to the Remote Desktop Users group on the computer, the user must logon using the administrator account.
Below are the steps that must be performed in order to add a non-administrative user account to the Remote Desktop Users group in order to allow the account to accept the remote desktop connections from the remote computers:

Log on to the Windows 7 computer with the administrator account. Click the Start button. At the bottom of the Start menu, in the search box, type COMPMGMT.MSCcommand and hit Enter key. On the opened Computer Management snap-in, from the left pane, expandLocal Users and Groups tree. From the expanded list, click to select Groups. From the right pane, double-click the Remote Desktop Users group. On the Remote Desktop Users Properties box, click Add button. In the available field in the Select Users box that appears, type the name of the non-admin user account that is to be allowed to accept the remote desktop connection requests from the remote computers. Click Check Names button to verify the validity of the typed user account. Once done, click OK button to add the selected user to Remote Desktop Usersgroup. Back on the previous box, click OK to save the changes. The non-administrator user account can now be used to establish remote desktop connection from the remote computers.