I stopped using LogMeIn during the past year due to their huge price increases. I have access to Teamviewer through MaxFocus for my managed customers. But I still wanted a remote connection solution for my other customers.

I eventually selected Splashtop Business, both for its ease of use and low price. It works great for what I need to do – quick remote access to a computer, supports multiple monitors, and has a built in file transfer capability.

I very rarely use Splashtop on a server, but I had need to do so recently due to an issue while reinstalling Teamviewer on an SBS 2011 server.

I connected fine, but the refresh rate of the video screen was horrible, and almost totally useless. I dug around and discovered that Splashtop requires more video memory than what most servers provide, due to the way Splashtop does it’s video refresh.

The workaround solution is to disable hardware acceleration (see Splashtop support article).

1. Right click on an empty part of the desktop, then click Screen Resolution
2. Click the Advance settings link
3. Click the Troubleshoot tab
4. Click the Change settings button, then move the Hardware accelerator to None
5. Click OK, and close windows.
6. NOTE: No reboot of the server is required.

However, there’s one problem: if Splashtop is not refreshing your screen properly, how do you do the above steps?

What I found that worked is that as I did each of the above steps, I immediately closed my Splashtop connection, and then reopened it, and found that the screen was at the next step.

One final note: Splashtop now has a newer solution that does not require turning off hardware acceleration. that involves installing a mirror driver. But this solution also requires you to reboot the server. I will try this out at a later time.