I am trying to connect from my MacBook to my Windows 7 machine within my own network - if it will work from outside my network that's a plus but no need to have. My Windows 7 machine is freshly installed with Windows 7 Home Premium. It runs the built-in firewall with no settings changed so far as well as Microsoft Security Essentials. So far I tried CoRD and Microsofts Remote Desktop Connections to connect from my Mac to my Windows machine without any success. I did try and disabled the firewall on my Windows machine but could not connect either. The reason I did this was to check wether there is a Windows firewall setting preventing me from connecting. On top of that I manually started the Remote Desktop Services and Remote Desktop Configuration within services.msc. Is there anything else I have to enable for a remote desktop connection? Could there be any router setting I have to tweak? Since I do not want to connect from outside my own network I thought I don't have to do any port forwarding. The error messages I retrieve are all connection timeouts. I can however ping the hostname and/or IP address. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, jrn