Remote Access Brings Your Office to You

It's the nightmarish flip side of the on-the-route productivity we discussed last week: Y'all've grabbed your laptop and headed out to a client'south role, gear up to dazzle him or her with a presentation. After some small talk, you lot flip open your machine, fire up Microsoft PowerPoint, and discover...you can't observe the file. Information technology's securely sitting on your dwelling house role PC—fifteen miles away.

How could you be then stupid? Maybe you saved the document to a wink drive that you left plugged into your desktop computer and forgot to accept with you lot. Mayhap yous saved information technology to a folder that isn't synchronized with your Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrivecloud storage account.

Alternatively, let'due south say you lot're a telecommuter who works two or 3 days a calendar week at home and, on 1 of your dwelling part days, you find you need a certificate from your cubicle PC at work. No matter how yous find yourself in this type of predicament, you lot're in problem—unless you take an assistant back at your part who can send yous the file yous need. Or, failing that, you volition be fine if you can magically reach across the miles and pull the file from your main system.

Fortunately, since this is the age of high-tech magic, you lot can. Really, you lot could have washed information technology back in the low-tech days of DOS. What y'all need is remote admission, a way to control and fetch files from what's called a host PC (which you left switched on back at the office) using what's chosen a client or local PC (which is what you accept with you). If you have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive in your home office, used for backup or as a server for multiple computers, you can grab files from the drive from anywhere in that location's an Internet connection. Such devices give y'all your ain private deject.

Remote access software solutions, by dissimilarity, permit you do more than simply retrieve files, equally lifesaving every bit that may exist. These solutions piece of work by sending your keyboard and mouse (or touchpad) input to the host PC and sending back an image of its screen—and so it's as if you lot're nigh sitting in front of your primary arrangement. This lets y'all run applications you don't even have on the client machine. Say, for example, your abode office PC is a workstation with powerful graphics cards on which you lot run Computer-Aided Design (CAD) or engineering software. You tin can't run the software on your lightweight laptop but you can give a demonstration or show a client your designs and data sets by remotely logging in.

Ii Routes to Remote

As I said, remote access has been around for decades (Symantec had a popular programme called pcAnywhere which, given the reliability of dial-upwardly modems, I used to phone call pcSometimes). I've been playing with 2 of the best known examples today, LogMeIn Pro ($149 per twelvemonth) and Citrix's GoToMyPC ($10 per month for i user accessing one computer; $10 per boosted estimator). Both LogMeIn Pro and GoToMyPC are gratis to endeavour for a express time.

The two remote admission solutions piece of work the aforementioned style: You visit the vendor's website and sign upwards with a username (e.g., email account) and password, and then download a small host module which you install on your home office PC. Once that'south done, you can utilize any device with a Web browser (they take Android, iOS, Mac OS X, and Windows clients) from anywhere there'southward an Internet connexion to sign in at the website and see your accessible figurer or computers.

Enter another password and, if this is your first connection, you lot'll be prompted to download and install a viewer or ActiveX control. (LogMeIn also offers a Windows direct-connect customer or alternative to using a browser, which it suggests if you're using Windows ten'due south Microsoft Edge, just I used Internet Explorer 11 and Chrome instead. (Yep, over the holidays I upgraded Ye Olde Core i3 to Win 10 and Microsoft Office 2022, which is worth a cranky column in itself later.)

That done, the host PC'south screen appears on the customer's display—a black screen in GoToMyPC, which by default turns off desktop wallpaper to reduce lag (though I turned it back on for the screenshot below).

GoToMyPC offers pull-down menus and a tabbed dialog box for system options ranging from sound quality to printer pick. LogMeIn Pro has a pinnacle-of-screen toolbar including whiteboard and laser pointer tools for underlining or circling items on the screen. Both GoToMyPC and LogMeIn Pro provide a side-past-side File Manager view for transferring files and folders between systems. Each remote access solution too provides a shared clipboard and then you can select some text or spreadsheet data on the host and paste it into a document on the customer. Each supports hosts with multiple monitors, though I didn't test the feature.

Both programs yielded surprisingly snappy functioning over my 802.11n Wi-Fi and Cablevision ISP connection. The biggest complaint I had with either was my own fumbling when trying to switch betwixt remote control and sending keystrokes (like the Windows menu key) to the client.

Which solution did I like better? As a reviewer, I haven't seen a closer call in some time; I can simply recommend that you endeavour before you buy. I found GoToMyPC a bit friendlier to apply but LogMeIn Pro'due south card and toolbar a bit smoother in one case I topped its learning curve. Either one is a potentially invaluable resource for a part-time telecommuter or a forgetful traveler.

Accept yous used remote access to salvage the day or as an alternative to a teleworker's VPN customer? Share your staying-connected secrets in the comments below or at homeoffice.eric@gmail.com.