I have been planning to move my desktop on to the cloud for years, now it’s the right time as cloud technology has finally matured.

There has always been a need for me to print documents via Remote Desktop on my locally attached laser printer. Today, I finally got time to try this out, I thought it was as simple as enabling the Printer in Local Resources under Remote Desktop options, but it turns out no printer was found in the RDP session PC. In additional, Windows 7 or W2K8 doesn’t have this problem as printer drivers were loaded by default, only Windows XP or W2K3 needs to install printer drivers.

After Google a bit, I was able to locate the answer that all you need is to install the printer driver on the remote PC as well. Soon after I’ve done that, the remote printer showed up magically. Besides, I was also able to tested out the local drive letters and USB disks on demand, they all worked flawlessly, so no need to use VPN and Shared Folder function any more. Worried about RDP’s security? It’s encrypted, if you need much higher level, then use Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 will do the trick.

Now it’s time for me to Acronis my 13 years old desktop (Dual PIII 850Mhz,1GB Ram and 120GB IDE, amazingly it’s still running and can play HD MKV!) and send it to the cloud by using vCenter Converter, then I can connect with any thin client (e.g., iPhone) as long as it has Remote Desktop, I can finally open my huge Excel way faster now! Yeah!