When I received a new work laptop last month with a 4k screen, I began to come across all sorts of issues with various programs. While some applications scale nicely, others do not. One of my biggest pains has been with using Remote Desktop.

Here’s a typical remote desktop session window:

 

With the server running at 1600×1200, and my desktop at 3840×2160, you can see that the remote desktop window takes up less than a quarter of the screen. On a 15″ screen, that makes the text almost unreadable!

Remote Desktop doesn’t support scaling, but fortunately Remote Desktop Connection Manager does. You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=21101

Now I can scale the Remote Desktop window, and save having to squint at the screen all day long!

 

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I recently received a new laptop at work – a 2.4Ghz i7 with 16 Gb of memory.

That’s quite a beast of a laptop, so you’d think it would have no problem coping with Visual Studio 2013. But over the last few days it’s been frustrating me a little – there’s a noticeable lag when typing, and Visual Studio as well as various other programs were performing a little slow.

I immediately disabled all extensions, and removed the recently installed virus checker, but to no avail.

It wasn’t until I checked Task Manager that I noticed the problem, CPU usage was 0% of 0.77 Ghz.

That can’t be right!

It turns out I had switched the power profile last week while running on battery, and changed to “Power Saver” mode. I thought these settings only took effect when running on battery? Apparently not. I’m now back on “High Performance”, and Visual Studio is once again responsive.

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