If you use Windows Vista, you will probably receive the following prompt when you try to connect to a pre-Windows Vista computer using Remote Desktop Connection:
Remote Desktop cannot verify the identity of the computer you want to connect to. This problem can occur if:
1) The remote computer is running a version of Windows that is earlier than Windows Vista.
2) The remote computer is configured to support only the RDP security layer.
Contact your network administrator or the owner of the remote computer for assistance.
Do you want to connect anyway?
This prompt appears every… single… time you try to connect to a Windows XP, Windows 2000 Server, or Windows 2003 Server computer, no matter how often you connect to it. And clicking “OK” gets really old, not because it’s hard to do, but because it’s just one extra step that Microsoft added to save us from ourselves.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to make this message go away:
- Make sure that “Show hidden files and folders” is enabled on your system.
- Go to your “Documents” folder.
- Open the DEFAULT.RDP file within the Documents folder with Notepad (or any other text editor).
- Look for the string of text that says “authentication level:i:2”.
- Change the “2” to a zero (“authentication level:i:0”).
- Save the file and exit Notepad.
The next time you try to connect via RDP, that annoying prompt should be gone!
NOTE: If you have multiple .RDP files, you will need to make this change to all of them to kill that annoying prompt.