I dont know, personally if I was going to use a pay program for the ability to remote connect easily I would probably go with something like PCAnywhere. Sure you need to install it on the remote pc too but then at least you know that you are using a secure connection that other people don't have any connection to. I'm with the others in feeling a little iffy about giving a website full access to my pc. I know it's highly unlikely they would use it improperly but it only takes one employee having a bad day that randomly chooses your pc to mess with to cause a lot of problems for you.

I do most of my Windows stuff on Win 2000 Pro SR4. It has that much (to Services), but it does not have "Terminal Services." Instead, it has "Telnet." That provides a primitive access (directory list, cd, put, get), but you can't run programs through it. I believe I read somewhere that Vista has full remote desktop access, but I haven't seen it.

The folks at PC Stats have a page titled Beginners Guides: Remote Access to Computers which appears to address the problem pretty thoroughly. Note that Virtual Network Computing is unencrypted!

One Linux "equivalent" is Desktop Sharing, though there are a lot of alternatives in the Linux world. Desktop Sharing is secure (encrypted). The link to alternatives are for openSuSE, which is where I do most of my Linux work. I have set two computers up with a shared desktop, and found both keyboards and mice live. Things don't happen quite as fast on the "remote" desktop, but it's really very close to being on the home machine. If you don't need the full capabilities of a shared desktop, SSH is a secure shell login (very common), and SSH -X lets you run X-windows (GUI) software on the master computer, and have it displayed graphically on the remote machine. This mode is both encrypted and compressed, so the graphical data transfer is fast. If you read documentation on X-windows, be aware that the terms "client" and "server" are reversed from their usage in the rest of the computer world.

Also be aware that if you want to access your computer from a truly remote location, you need to know its IP address, and you my also have to tweak your firewall (You have one, right?) to get it to accept incoming traffic. In the Linux world, that is an integral part of the encryption preliminaries.

I have used LogMeIn before and I found it to be quite slow and the software that you need running on the remote computer to be a bit memory intensive during startup. I know someone who uses LogMeIn on their Mac because they have family who troubleshoot for them and they say it is great.

I am not concerned about unauthorized access to my computer because I do not store very personal files on it and there is always System Restore for most things.

As for Linux, can't you use open a Telnet server and telnet to the IP address of the remote system and administrate from there?

Ya, all my computers are just remotely controlled over Remote Desktop Connection. It's a lot safer and I have total control of my computer. It's free, it comes with Windows and I know that no one is going to sniff around. (To my best abilities of course).

I love controlling every single computer in my house, especially if I need to do something there. I just take my laptop and just access all the desktops when I need it and am too lazy to move my butt over there.

xboxrulz

Which operating system do you have on your computers ? I thought that Remote Desktop Connexion was only available on Windows 2003 servers ? Or is it also available on Windows XP ?
Regards
Yordan

VNC is secure, your own (java applet hosted on the computer), and not M$. Best of all worlds imo.

All my computers, except my current desktop run Windows XP. My current system is running Vista. I have a "mobile command centre", which is my laptop, which runs on MacOS X Leopard which has Remote Desktop Connection client installed.

xboxrulz

You asked. I have 7 (currently running) computers. Three of them do 90% of my work. The oldest has Windows 95. The next-oldest has 7 personalities (bootable partitions) and spends most of its time in SuSE linux 8.1 as a MediaWiki server with math extensions. That's were I learned to love ImageMagick. Adding the other 5 computers gets me to over 30 personalities including Win2K, Win XP, Win Vista and many flavors of SuSE and other Linuces.

Now, to the subject of this topic. Windows 2000 Pro SP4 has services like

• Remote Access Auto Connection Manager
• Telnet Allows a remote user to log on to the system and run console programs using the command line.

but does not appear to have remote desktop capability natively in Windows.

Windows XP Home has

• Terminal Services Allows multiple users to be connected interactively to a machine as well as the display of desktops and applications to remote computers.
• Remote Access Auto Connection Manager Creates a connection to a remote network whenever a program references a remote DNS or NetBIOS name or address.
• Remote Access Connection Manager Creates a network connection.
• Remote Desktop Help Session Manager -- Which I believe is primarily for technician access to your computer.

Remote Access Connection Manager and Telnet are on by default.

Windows Vista Home Basic has

• Terminal Services Configuration
• Terminal Services Allows user to connect interactively to a remote computer ...
• Remote Access Auto Connection Manager Creates a connection to a remote network whenever a program references a remote DNS or NetBIOS name or address.
• Remote Access Connection Manager Creates a network connection.

Remote Access is off by default, Terminal Services on. It is also worth noting that other services, such as Software Licensing are on by default in Vista.

In summary, it appears that Win2k has command-mode remote access, XP and Vista have GUI remote access, but it is on by default in XP and off by default in Vista (since it is a potential security vulnerability. If you think Microsoft is sensitive to security issues in Vista, consider that Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is on in all three systems. That is a major security issue, but Microsoft appears to use it in so much of its networking software that it can't function without it.

I used it didn't really like it much if your on a static ip or setup a dns hostname i would say use realvnc it don't use much ram or cpu it's not that big runs fine and it don't lag say if you reboot and when the server starts up you can't really tell it.