I'm off on holiday in February for three weeks and will be leaving my shop in the hands of rather computer illiterate staff. Can anybody recommend good software to I can access and control my work PC from a laptop while I'm away so I can sort out any problems? I don't mind paying for it, but free is always good.

Log Me In seems to be popular, but is it the best choice?

[Edited on 11/1/11 by Jasper]

My missus uses LogMeIn which works well. Apart from our carp internet access that is. Seems reliable enough.

Yes I use log me in for my business, was able to link in from San Francisco works well and is stable

Carp internet access eh, sounds a bit fishy to me

Cool, I'll go with Log Me In.

We use Logmein free to access a couple of hundred machines on sites scattered all over the world, it's pretty good even over a suprisingly poor internet connection. The best bit is not having to muck about with forwarding ports and stuff, as long as the machine can see out to the internet it just works.

I use "mstsc"

microsoft terminal services. Its standard with windows (so free).

I don't know the pros and cons, but it works for me.

Matt

The bosses in work use gotomypc. At the moment they're up in london at the boat show, and they've left their pcs on in swansea so they can do everything without having to copy programs and stuff to their laptop. I havn't used it myself, but I do like the advert with the pigeons carrying a keyboard,lol.

we use logmein in both its free and logmeinrescue forms and both have always been reliable.

Thanks guys, Log Me In all sorted and paid for, I can't risk a meltdown while I'm away!!

argh....

windows comes with perfectly good software for doing this...

Remote desktop connection

right click my computer, click properties

click advanced system settings

click Remote

choose your settings

make sure your ip is static on your local network, forward port 3389 to the static ip address you set on your local machine on your router

on your remote computer click start, programs, accessories, Remote Desktop Connection - type the IP address of the computer you want to connect to

job done.


note. if your on a dynamic ip you can setup a dyndns service and give your computer a name on the internet eg. mypc.dyndns.org then as your ip changes it will be passed on to the dyndns service.


there are many other alternatives to logmein, many of which are free and much much better. see VNC as another alternative

logmein provides 1 thing no one else does though a very very easy setup

Mike


edit to add when using remote desktop you must have a password set on your account (good practice anway)

[Edited on 12/1/11 by MikeFellows]

Logmein is free, and it's fairly idiot-proof to boot.

RDP/VNC etc are all very well on a local network, but if you have more than one machine behind the same router that you need to access, then you need to start messing about with changing port numbers to be able to hit the right machine from the outside. If you're putting machines on customer sites behind someone else's router that isn't always possible. And if you don't do this sort of thing for a living, setting up port forwarding and static IP/dynDNS may not be that easy anyway.

I haven't played too much with RDP over pants connections, but Logmein piddles all over pretty much any variant of VNC I've tried over low bandwidth connections.

I use Teamveiwer or Tight VNC

Tight VNC is slower than VNC