Terminal Server Performance Tweaks

The first thing to do is to override some desktop settings to reduce the amount of screen refreshes, which lowers bandwidth used, which makes the TS respond "faster". First we will remove Windows Resize Animation, when a user minimizes or maximizes a window it will be immediate, and not shrink slowly on its way down to the task bar. Open up the registry with regedit and browse to:

HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlTerminalServerWinStationsRDP-TcpUserOverrideControl PanelDesktop

And change these values:

"AutoEndTasks" REG_SZ "1" (terminates programs that aren’t responding)
"CursorBlinkRate" REG_SZ "-1" (prevents the cursor from blinking, cutting down on screen redraws)
"DragFullWindows" REG_SZ "0" (disables "show contents" while dragging a window)
"MenuShowDelay" REG_SZ "10" (delay for showing submenus)
"WaitToKillAppTimeout" REG_SZ "20000" (number of milliseconds to wait before terminating an application that has stopped responding)
"SmoothScroll Dword" REG_DWORD "00000000" (disables smooth scrolling)
"Wallpaper" REG_SZ "(none)" (disables wallpaper)

Now browse over to:

HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlTerminalServerWinStationsRDP-TcpUserOverrideControl PanelDesktopWindowMetrics

And change this value:

"MinAnimate" REG_SZ "0" (disables the animation when resizing a window)

If any of these keys, subkeys or values do not exist, create them. This will not really improve server performance but it will enhance the user experience and make it appear to be faster to end users, which hopefully cuts down on complaints. For your convenience I have written a REG file which you can get here. Save as tsperf.reg and run it on the terminal server.