Enable Concurrent Sessions In Windows Vista Business and Ultimate (SP1 32 and 64bit)

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Enable Concurrent Sessions In Windows Vista Business and Ultimate (SP1 32 and 64bit)
What is Concurrent Sessions?

Concurrent sessions is a feature in server editions of Windows that lets more than one user to log on remotely and use the server at the same time. By default in Vista when you connect to a remote computer using Remote Desktop it will force the user who is physically sat at the computer to log off, this concurrent sessions hack allows you to Remote Desktop in to a computer without logging the current active user off, this will allow two people to use the same computer running Vista at the same time.

Why would you want to do this?

There could be many different reasons, for example in our house we have a dedicated Media Centre PC running in the living room, its handy for me to be able to log on to the pc without disrupting the person watching TV, with concurrent sessions I can do this.

It could also be useful if you have a shared computer and want to access your computer from school/work when someone else at home is using the computer, with the concurrent sessions hack you could do this without disrupting the user physically sat at the computer.

How to do it?

This is actually very easy now, a user on the greenbutton forums called untermensch has created a script that automates the entire process for you.

You can download the concurrent sessions hack from the Digiex mirror

After it has downloaded unzip and it and click on the install.bat file, if you have UAC enabled you might right click and run as Administrator.

Before installing make sure your Vista install has Service Pack 1 installed, this will not work if you don’t have SP1.

The script will ask if you want to continue:

Say yes

The concurrent sessions hack will now install:

The installer will finish and check the Remote Desktop service is listening again:

That’s it, all been well the hack is installed successfully.

To test it out simply leave the current user logged on to the pc, now connect to the computer remotely using a different user account to the one you left logged on. If all has gone well both users will be logged on and active.

Here is a screen shot of me logged on to our Media Center remotely without logging the Media Center user off:

Apparently this hack will install on Vista Home Premium and enable the use of remote desktop (remote desktop is not supposed to be included in Vista Home Premium)

I don’t have a computer running Home Premium to test this out on, if you choose to do so try it at your own risk. Feel free to report back on your findings with Vista Home Premium.

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