How to End a Remote Desktop Session

How to end a Remote Desktop session completely

“I completed a Remote Desktop session between two computers on our network. I right-clicked the Close button at the top of the screen, where you can see the computer to which you are connected. But I’m curious if this just closes the screen of the remote computer on the computer you’re working on or if it completely logs off the remote computer?”

Three ways to log off the remote computer

To help you log off the remote computer instead of just closing the screen of the remote computer, here we listed three tested methods.

Method 1. Sign out using Ctrl + Alt + End

The easiest to completely end a Remote Desktop session is to press Ctrl + Alt + End altogether on the remote computer. Then you’ll see the following screen show up. Click Sign out to log out of the remote desktop.

Method 2. End a remote session using Session ID

Step 1. On the remote computer, right-click the Start menu in the bottom-left corner, and then click Command Prompt.

Step 2. Type “query user” and hit Enter.

Step 3. Then you will see a list of users on the server. Find your user name in the list and note the session ID number. In the below example, my session ID is 291.

Step 4. Type “logoff” followed by a space and the session ID you wish to log off. Then hit Enter.

Step 5. Then you’ll see the remote session signing out.

Method 3. End a remote session using qwinsta and rwinsta commands

Step 1. On the remote computer, open Command Prompt. Run the command qwinsta to get all Remote desktop sessions on the server. Type in the following command:

qwinsta /server:SERVER NAME

Note: Replace SERVER NAME with the name of your server. For example, here my server name is wowhvdev1, then I need to type in the following command and press Enter:

Step 2. From the list of sessions, find the one you want to end and note down its ID. Then enter the following command:

Rwinsta /server:wowhvdev1 RemoteID

Note: Replace RemoteID with the ID of the session you want to end. For example, here the ID of the session that I want to end is 11, then I need to type in the following command and press Enter:

AnyViewer: Remote desktop software easy to log off

AnyViewer is the free third-party remote desktop software for Windows. The way to end a remote session on AnyViewer is quite easy compared to Remote Desktop. You just need to click the close button on the upper-right corner, then the whole remote session will completely end. See, it’s pretty easy.

Next, let's see how to use AnyViewer to remotely connect to another computer:

Step 1. Download, install and launch AnyViewer on both computers. Go to Log in, and then click Sign up. (If you already have signed up on its official website, you can log in directly.)

Step 2. Fill in the signup information.

Step 3. Then you can see you successfully logged in to AnyViewer. Your device will automatically be assigned to the account you've logged in.

Step 4. Log in to the same AnyViewer account on the two devices, then you can achieve a direct connection by clicking Remote control.

Note: If you upgrade your account to Professional or Enterprise edition, then you’ll have more rights. You can assign more devices. Also, you can connect to another computer in privacy mode, which means you can black the screen and block the mouse and keyboard of the remote computer.

Conclusion

This post summarizes three methods on how to end a Remote Desktop session completely. Firstly, you can sign out a remote session using Ctrl + Alt + End combination. Secondly, it’s possible to end a remote session using its Session ID. Finally, you can also end a remote session using qwinsta and rwinsta commands.

At the end of the post, we recommend the free remote desktop software AnyViewer to you. AnyViewer is easy to connect to and also very easy to log off. If you are worried about not logging off the remote computer after you end a remote session, you can use AnyViewer to easily get this done.