I do a lot of work from home by connecting to my work network via VPN and then using remote desktop to my work computer.   Lately though the Remote Desktop has been painfully slow.

After some searching I found this link.

Here’s an excerpt:

In any event, I discovered that Vista’s Receive Window Auto-Tuning could have issues on some networks.  I use Remote Desktop all the time to manage 30+ servers.  After adjusting Receive Window Auto-Tuning, the “slowness” problem with mouse-clicks, keystrokes, and screen redraws went away. Problem solved! Woo-hoo!

Here is what you need to do if you have the same issue:

- Run a command prompt (cmd.exe) as an Administrator

In some cases you may need to use this command in addition to the above, but I didn’t have to:

If you want to to re-set it back to normal:

The reason is that this command will still “auto tune” your TCP connections, but not as drastically as ‘normal’ mode. It will allow the receive window to grow beyond the default value, but again it will do so very conservatively. In this mode, Windows 7 will by default use RWIN (receive window) of 16,384 bytes with a scale factor of 2. I was browsing computers in my Network Neighborhood and trying to get to \computernamec$ which was taking forever to load. I changed it to highlyrestricted and it was much faster. ‘highlyrestricted’ mode is my recommendation for the fastest network performance whether you are using Remote Desktop, Internet browsing, or doing SMB file copies across your network.

This did the trick for me and worked wonderfully!