How to Press and Send Ctrl-Alt-Del in Remote Desktop Connection Window

Remote Desktop Connection client allows user to remotely connect and administer another Windows computer that is running Microsoft Terminal Services. As with most remote control system or even virtualization process, which effectively and virtually run two or more system on a single physical machine, user will have problem to trigger Control-Alt-Delete (Ctrl+Alt+Del) keyboard shortcut key combination.
Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard shortcut has been commonly used since IBM PC with DOS era to perform soft reboot, and used in modern Windows system to activate Winlogon process (log on to Windows NT), open Task Manager or Windows Security dialog box that allows user to log off, lock computer, shutdown PC, run Task Manager, switch user and other functions.

However, whenever trying to trigger Ctrl-Alt-Del function on remote system connected via Remote Desktop Connection, the keyboard shortcut combination pressed will bring up the Ctrl+Alt-Del function on the local machine instead of the machine remotely logged on via RDC.

This behavior is by design though, as Ctrl-Alt-Del key combination is too important for any PC (to run especially when computer encounters halt error or hang). As such, Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard shortcut is always reserved for local host computer.

In order to send Ctrl-Alt-Del keystrokes to remote computer connected via Remote Desktop client, just press the following workaround:

Ctrl+Alt+End

Tools To Simulate CPU / Memory / Disk Load

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Lot of people search for tools to simulate high CPU, Memory and Disk issues. Here are the tools we can use

Simulate High CPU Usage

CPUSTRES.EXE is a tool you can use to simulate High CPU usage by an user mode process. Its available for download from the Windows Sysinternals website.

Here I have used CPUSTRES to simulate 50% CPU usage.

CPUSTRES also has options to change the priority of the threads it spawns.

Simulate High Memory Usage

To simulate high memory usage you can use the TestLimit tool from the Sysinternals website. TestLimit can be used to simulate a variety of memory leak issues. Here I am using TestLimit to reduce the Available memory on my machine.

 

Simulate High Disk Activity

SQLIO is a tool for benchmarking the I/O capacity of a given storage system. It can simulate sequential and random I/O and is usually used to test storage systems for SQL Server installations.

SQLIO is an useful tool that you can use to simulate high disk activity.

Simulate High Disk Usage

Another useful tool to simulate these issues is consume.exe. It ships with Windows SDK and can be used to consume resources like CPU, memory and disk. Here I am using consume.exe to simulate low disk space issues.

NOTE : Use these tools with extreme caution as they can freeze the machine you run them on and you might end up rebooting the machine.