Remote Desktop Connection - Using ALT+F4?

[craigp]

Hey all,

A friend of my is nearly a switcher. He's a dye-in-the-wood Windows sys admin, but we've recently been able to convince our work that he needs a laptop for when he's on-site, and that a Mac machine would be the best option for him.

He's got lots of the usual questions, and most I'm able to answer without too much of a fuss.

The one thing that he has asked about that I can't seem to fathom is with Remote Desktop Connection. He has a load of Windows boxes and needs to be able to administer them from the Mac. MS's RDC looks good, for the main, but neither of us can seem to get the Alt+F4 key combination used extensively in Windows to work.

We've tried Alt+F4 key - which brings up System Preferences (because we don't have the 'use function keys' option on). We've tried Alt+Fn+F4 - but this just does nothing.

There is a preference in RDC to set up the Alt keys, etc... to map between the Mac keyboard and Windows, but that all seems to be set up as you would expect.

Can anyone offer any help? We're using the latest RDC Beta (v2.0.0 Beta 3).

Thanks!

 

[bentoms]

Hmm.. I'd suggest he run Parrallels to administer his servers.

Another progrm he can look at is CORD

 

[chaboud]

Just in case anyone else came looking.

I googled for this very thing before I thought for a moment:

"Oh.. duh. The alt is above the option. That's typically *shift*."

And the answer is Shift+option+F4. This may be different if you leave your function keys mapped by default to system control, but, as a programmer, function keys are far more important to me (would it be too much to ask for some discrete control keys?).

You might need to use Shift+fn+option+F4, but it should be easy enough to figure out.

 

[blindzombie]

I got it to work with shift-fn-alt/option-F4

 

[sconstantine]

Nice one! I thought I had tried every combo and simply gave up on using ALT-F4 from within an RDC window. Adding that extra shift to the fn+alt+F4 combo did the trick. Thanks guys!