Remote Administration

[Clocker]

What program / service did you guru's currently recommend for me to be able to login/control to my parent's Win7 Home PC.....that would be senior citizen-proof?

My parent's are not good with computers. I can get physical access to the PC, if needed, to install something.

Thanks,
Clocker

 

[Mercutio]

1. Make a Hamachi account on the web.
2. Create a Private Network for your purposes.
3. Deploy Hamachi on relevant computers.
4. Go in to Services.msc to configure the service (LogMeIn Hamachi) to restart every time it stops.
5. Use the Hamachi web interface to make sure every computer is approved and added to your VPN

OK that gives you a path to get to relevant machines. It also allows for file transfers and the like.

Personally, I don't suffer Windows Home editions, but your primary choices for remote admin are going to wind up being VNC, which is a bandwidth hog; or Windows Remote Desktop, which isn't normally available for Windows Home editions. Fortunately, there are ways around that. Given a choice between the two, RDP is the clear, clear winner and worth the time to set up.

 

[Bozo]

How about programs like PCAnywhere??

 

[Mercutio]

Last I heard PCAnywhere was security risk central.

 

[timwhit]

What about regular LogMeIn? I've used it for a few years for the same purpose and it's been fine for me.

 

[Howell]

Teamviewer is incredibly easy and free for home use.

 

[Mercutio]

What about regular LogMeIn? I've used it for a few years for the same purpose and it's been fine for me.

Kind of. It's a remote view application, but given the choice between having a remote interface using somebody's special tool (pretty sure it's just a VNC implementation anyway) and having a full blown private network that can support anything you damned well please... I'll take the latter.

 

[ddrueding]

If you don't mind dropping some coin and just want it to work all the time, I use gotomypc.com. No firewall configuration, no silly dyndns stuff, decently quick, no software needed on the machine you use to connect.

 

[Clocker]

Thanks guys. Teamviewer seems like the simplest deal to setup and, given that I will rarely need to use this anyway, I'll probably give that a try. But the Hamachi thing sounds very cool so I may experiment with that too. Don't want to spend a monthly fee on this because I will probably only use it 1-2 times per year.