Windows provides several avenues for accessing one PC from another across the Internet. If you’re a road warrior armed with a laptop, you may be delighted by these features. If you’re a corporate employee who used to think you could escape the office by going home, you may not.
In any case, each of these remote access features requires a good deal of setup and some scavenging through the technical underbrush, and each offers slightly different benefits and drawbacks. But when you’re in Tulsa and a spreadsheet you need is on your PC in Tallahassee, you may be grateful to have at least one of these systems in place.
And besides—if you’re connecting to PCs at your corporate office, your corporate IT people have probably already done all the hard work of getting the computers at work set up for you to connect to them from home or the road.
The two most common scenarios for using these remote access features are (a) controlling your home PC remotely using a laptop and (b) connecting to your office network from your PC at home. To help you keep the roles of these various computers straight, the computer industry has done you the favor of introducing specialized terminology:
The host computer is the home-base computer—the unattended one that’s waiting for you to connect.
The remote computer is the one you’ll be using: your laptop on the road, for example, or your home machine (or laptop) when you tap into the office network.
This chapter covers two systems of connecting:
Virtual private networking (VPN). Using this system, you use the Internet as a secure link between the host and the remote machine. The remote computer behaves exactly as though it has joined the network of the host system—usually your company’s network.
Remote Desktop. This feature doesn’t just make the remote PC join the network of the host; it actually turns your computer into the faraway host PC, filling your screen with its screen image. When you touch the trackpad on your laptop, you’re actually moving the cursor on the home-base PC’s screen, and so forth.
To make Remote Desktop work, you have to connect to a computer running Windows 8, Windows 7 (Professional and above), Vista (Business and above), XP Pro, or Windows Server. But the machine you’re connecting from can be any relatively recent Windows PC, a Macintosh (to get a free copy of Remote Desktop Connection for Mac, visit www.microsoft.com/mac/), or even a computer running Linux (you’ll need the free rdesktop client, available from www.rdesktop.org).
The world is filled with more powerful, more flexible products that let you accomplish the same things as these Windows features, from software programs like LapLink, Carbon Copy, and pcAnywhere to Web sites like www.gotomypc.com.
On the other hand, Remote Desktop is free.
Finally, note that these are all methods of connecting to an unattended machine. If somebody is sitting at the PC back home, you might find it far more convenient to connect using Remote Assistance, described in Chapter 9. It’s easier to set up and offers the same kind of “screen sharing” as Remote Desktop.