How to make a remote Windows app feel faster.

Latency is how long a message takes to go to the far machine and come back. It is the gap between pressing a key and seeing the letter, so lower is better. Jitter is how much that gap varies from moment to moment. Speed is how much data you can move per second.

For most programs the one you feel is latency, and then jitter. A steady connection of moderate latency often feels better than a fast one that swings. Speed only becomes the bottleneck for things with lots of moving pixels, like video or large drawings.

As a loose rule of thumb: under about 60 milliseconds feels close to local, up to about 120 is comfortable for everyday work and past about 200 you start to notice a delay in typing and dragging. People differ, and so do programs, so treat the numbers as a guide, not a rule.

You can measure yours in about ten seconds with our connection test. It tests the connection from you to this website, which is the part you can usually improve yourself.

In rough order of how much difference they make.

• Use a cable. Ethernet is steadier than Wi-Fi, and steadiness is what you are after. If you cannot, sit closer to the router.
• Pause what else is using the network. Video calls, big downloads and cloud backups all compete for the same connection.
• Avoid weak mobile signal. If you must use mobile data, shorten sessions and save more often.
• Restart a router that has been running for months. It sounds like a joke and it helps more often than you would think.
• Choose a location near you when you have the choice. Distance adds delay that nothing else removes.

Turn off visual effects in the program if it offers them, and avoid wallpapers and animations on a remote desktop. Smaller windows have less to draw. If your setup lets you pick display quality, a slightly lower setting is a good trade on a poor connection.

Close what you are not using. Every extra open window is more to keep in step.

A connection that is excellent at seven in the morning can be quite different at eight in the evening when a household is streaming. Test at the time of day you will actually be working, and test more than once. It is a small habit that heads off bad surprises.

Sometimes the slowness is the program itself, or the machine it runs on being busy. If other remote programs feel fine on the same connection, the program or the machine is the suspect. Tell whoever looks after the machine what you were doing and when, so they can look.