best remote access method?

putty is a SSH client. Well it's a package that contains a SSH client an a lot more tools. But a client alone won't help you since you need to run a SSH server on your system to be able to access it with putty.

Also SSH comes from the unix world, so without any fancy additions you'll only get console access to your system. There is X11 support over SSH (X11 is the graphical interface in the unix world), but that won't help you much with Windows.

If you want to look into this I advice you to setup a OpenSSH server on your system and disallowing plaintext logins, but only logins through public-private-key-authentification, which is pretty much the safest method.

OpenSSH also provides a SFTP server, which is essentially a FTP server backed with SSH. It lets you easily transfer files from and to your system.

You also need to make sure that the port where the SSH server listens to is forwarded to the net, IF you want to access it from anywhere.

Anyway, SSH works pretty good for me. I have the SSH port of one of my system forwarded to the net, so I can access it from there. If I'm logged into this system I can access my other machines on the network from there (even shut them down or power them up through magic packets / WoL).

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If you need graphical support you should look into one of these VNC tools, like tightvnc. Some of them also use SSH to encrypt / tunnel the data to your system.

Jam it back in, in the dark.