Enabling Remote Desktop remotely

So I ran into the need to enable remote desktop on a computer about 300 miles away this morning. Here is what I did.

First off I logged into my virtual XP machine with a domain admin account. I then launched the registry editor and connected to the registry of the remote machine. I then navigated to the following path on the remote registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server

Once in the terminal server key, change the DWORD value for fDenyTSConnections from 1 to 0. (1 = Disabled, 0 = Enabled)

The remote machine won't automatically start working, so you'll need to reboot it. You can do this by running the following from command prompt.

shutdown -m \\remotecontroller -r


Enjoy