Remote access
 

I need to have the remote desktop feature, but the host computer doesn't have WinXP Pro, just Home edition. I'm wondering if there are any programs which will allow this -- and if they actually let you see the desktop and run programs and such on the host computer from a remote computer. And any opinions on which ones are the best would be appreciated.

RealVNC is free and awesome. I use it myself.

UltraVNC, Citrix, and others are great too, so I've heard. Citrix being the best, but costing money.

If you don't have it pre-installed, you could also download the stand-alone client if that would be an eaiser way of going about doing this. As far as I have been able to tell it has the same functionality as the XP Pro client.

http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/os...-software.html

Take a look there, too.

I don't know if there have been improvements but RealVNC was much slower than the windows client. So, if you can get that, do, unless someone can inform you otherwise. VNC is nice because it allows users on both ends to use the computer at once if that is necessary.

There is PC Anywhere, which is a Symantec product, so I imagine it would not be difficult to acquire. It is really slow, even inside of a 100 meg network though. At work we use a product from Funk Software called Proxy. There is a host that you install on the target PC, and a master that is install on your PC. You basically use master to scan a network segment for hosts and it spits out a list of available hosts. Connect to the desired host, input the password, should you password protect it {which I would advise}, and you will see its desktop as it currently looks. It is different from RDP in that you basically see what you would see on the monitor attached to the PC sees, rather than getting your own seperate desktop like you do in RDP.