Access Raspberry Pi from Windows laptop

Access a Raspberry Pi from Windows laptop

If you are using your TV or HDMI display as monitor for Raspberry Pi and want to free them ( as others want to watch TV) follow these steps to step up a remote desktop connection wtih RPi from your Laptop. Raspbian OS has has VNC (Virtual Network Computing) software already installed. But we need to enable it.

First connect both RPi and Laptop to the same wifi network/ethernet

1. Enable SSH and VNC on Raspberry Pi
This can be done either graphically or through the terminal.

a) Enabling SSH and VNC using terminal
Open terminal and enter
sudo raspi-config

The raspi-config opens
Go to Advanced Options>SSH and enable

Also enable VNC by Advanced Options>VNC and enable 

b) Enabling SSH and VNC using Graphical interface
In RPi go to Preferences > Raspberry Pi Configuration and click on Interfaces tab and enable VNC
Also enable SSH

2. In RPi terminal enter
hostname -I
Copy the the IP address displayed.We will ues this IP to connect to Pi later via VNC.

3. Download and install the VNC viewer program from VNC connect
https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/download/viewer

4. Launch VNC viewer on the laptop and enter the IP copied out in step 2.

5. Authenticate with the user name and password of your Raspberry Pi
Default user name: pi
Default Password: raspberry

Now you can disconnect pi hdmi port from the television and just leave it running, you have the RPi desktop on your laptop.

On next RPi reboot 
ssh into RPi and use hostname -I and get the IP of Rpi a then use VNC for remote desktop connection. Or you can login in your wifi router and find the IP of Raspberry Pi and then connect to Pi using VNC.

You can use an FTP client like FileZilla to transfer files between Pi and Laptop.