Any performance increasing tips for Remote Desktop?

[slugg]

I can't seem to find much through Google. Basically, I'm looking into the possibility of leaving my desktop on at all times and just remotely accessing it through a "netbook" style laptop while at school. I'd like to know what steps I could take to improve performance of the remote desktop experience.

This is pretty much all I know:
- Run in 15 bit color (256 is too little)
- Turn off themes and a bunch of visual stuff.

What exactly is bitmap caching, anyways?

So my primary usage for this "setup" is to run programs like Visual Studio, Mathematica, MATLAB, and various office-like applications. 256 colors just isn't enough for me - it doesn't show the code highlighting correctly in many of these programs, as well as misrepresenting graphs and stuff like that.

I don't plan on gaming or web surfing through the remote connection.

So... Any ideas?

 

[NickOlsen8390]

I have done RDC through a 768/256 DSL line and it was more then usable, with it on the default settings, like no themes or wallpaper, and it was fine.
It at times was sluggish for a second, then would catch up

How i loath AT&T DSL.

 

[nobody554]

I'm afraid I don't know how well VNC would work in this situation, but have you considered a web service like LogMeIn? It's got a bit less of a footprint than RDP and you can adjust fairly well how many colors you want coming through.