I always forget the settings that get solid results connecting to my CentOS/Fedora systems under Putty. Here’s the whole nine yards, maybe someone else will be able to use ’em as well.
Get putty from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html. I use the installer.
Get puttycyg from http://web.gccaz.edu/~medgar/puttycyg/. Unpack the .exe files over your putty folder. This will be c:\program files (x86)\Putty if you use the installer on x64 windows. You’ll want to replace the originals.
Drag pageant.exe into your startup folder.
Download bitstream vera from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/
Unpack the zipfile somewhere. Select all the .ttf files, right click, select install.
Start putty (you did make a quicklaunch icon, right?)
Under keyboard, select ‘Linux’ under ‘The function keys and keypad’
Under window, set lines of scrollback to something nice, like 10000
Under appearance, change the font to BitSteam Sans Vera Mono, any size you like. I use 9.
Under behavior, check ‘full screen on alt-enter’
Under translaction set character set to UTF-8
Under colors, adjust ANSI Blue to something like 100,100,255 (it’s too dark to read by default
Under connection, set seconds between keepalives to 600
Under connection-data, set terminal-type string to ’linux’
Under SSH-Auth, check ‘Allow Agent Forwarding’
Finally… go back to session, click ‘Default Settings’, and ‘Save’.