Hi all, have you ever had a remote desktop entry turn up in your Bonic Log that turns off GPU Tasks? I have remote assistance turned off on my computers, so How did they connect & who?

1/04/2018 11:20:30 a.m. | | Remote desktop in use; disabling GPU tasks
2/04/2018 7:16:13 a.m. | | Remote desktop not in use; enabling GPU tasks

There are the 2 entries, one under the other from my Log. any thoughts or ideas on how to prevent this remote hacking welcome. I use a third party firewall that integrates with the win 7 firewall?

Thanks Vicki

I access one of my Windows machines by Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection and get that message, which I take to be an acknowledgement that RDC is a source of activity that will affect how BOINC Manager manages tasks.

However, who is accessing the machine is indeed another question. There are usually two remote access settings in Windows, one for remote assistance and the other for direct RDC connections that don’t need the consent of the target machine (which is the kind I use). You need to turn both of those off, and perhaps look at the Windiws log to see what was going on.

great, now we are getting somewhere. so where are these off switches in win 7, sp1? Remote assistance has been off since I set up the machine again after it was remotely hacked beyond the capabilities of the windows repair disk. an address like c:\windows\<command name> would be useful.

“Control Panel : System : Change settings” will bring up the System Properties dialog box, then select the Remote tab and the settings for Remote Assistance and Remote Desktop will appear. Disable them both.

only the assistance box was there & it is already turned off. Home edition lacks some switches , or so it would seam.

According to answers on MS's site

Home Premium and below: Cannot act as a remote desktop host, terminal services disabled entirely. Can access other desktops remotely using RDP client.

Professional/Enterprise/Ultimate: Can act as a remote desktop host, terminal services limited to one user active at a time (ie, logging in remotely will kick a local user off and vice versa).

Further reading told me there are hacks to un-disable this service but this would (I assume) require physical access or remote assistance access to the machine. This raises the question as to why this message has popped up. As my only use of Windows machines apart from being an end user in the NHS is trouble shooting others' computers with lots of search engine research mostly it is probably time for me to bow out of this discussion!

Thanks for your thoughts Dave. as for enabling the ability to be hacked, I am not that stupid! it is bad enough that is already happening without me doing the hacked method to enable such connections. The other odd thing since resetting the affected desktop is that there have been no recorded hacking attempts blocked by the third party firewall program I use, making me wonder if I shouldn't have performed a low level format of the hard drive before reinstalation of windows, Bonic etc. Yuck, what a nightmare, somewhere in the realms of 2 days to get my desktop back to where it should be, if I did a back up followed by low level format, then windows etc. first things first, empty the current task list & minimize connection time in the interim.

I wouldn't automatically assume that this is a hacking/hacking attempt but as I say, I know little about windows these days, despite having just done a re-install on my partner's laptop after it became so slow as to be unusable even in safe mode. I didn't manage to work out what was causing the problem however.

I use the firewall facilities of my router as the main defence because I don't trust windows though I do believe it isn't as prone to attack as it used to be.

general sources of running slow:
too many programs / apps loading at boot time
lack of ram / Virtual memory setting too low. an sd card or usb stick can be used to increase this or increase size of actual installed ram to spec maximum.
conflicting programs, such as multiple firewalls / anti virus programs
drive is not defragmented often enough
drive is showing first signs of mechanical failure
system drive is too full, this affects the automatic virtual memory allocation
underpowered cpu for programs most frequently used or operating system
older hardware runs better on win xp, vista or 7 rather than win 10
too many browser add ons or open tabs.
Tracking cookies, virus or trogan at work

Remote desktop is a version of hacking if you are accessing without consent or being remotely accessed without your authorization.

Having just checked Internet usage during the time period the remote connection was active, 1.36 gigs of traffic.