Remote Access Report

In my last post, I told you about my experiment with LogMeIn, a free remote access site that would let me connect to my PC from my Mac while I was away from home. So, how’d it go? Just great.

Thanks to a relative lack of fires to put out or messes to clean up, I didn’t need to use the service as heavily as I thought I might. But whenever I needed it, it was there—no trouble logging in to my home computer, no trouble finding the files I needed either through direct access or the File Manager side, and the speed was actually pretty good considering I was using wireless internet on both ends of the connection. I ran AutoCAD LT for a bit, and while I wasn’t pushing it too hard, I didn’t notice any major reduction in performance.

I got a couple comments suggesting Dropbox or Virtualbox as other alternatives—one is a central file-storage system, and the other is a way to run Windows and Mac on the same machine. I can definitely imagine scenarios where those would come in handy too (and have used Dropbox before to share files), but in this case, the remote access was the most practical way to go, since I needed both programs and files, and I can’t ditch the PC entirely yet (although who knows—that day may come).

All in all, the experiment was a success. I’ll definitely be adding LogMeIn to my road-warrior bag of tricks.

Now, if only there was an equally effective trick to make flights depart on time…

Comments

[Owen Wengerd]

I would think a direct connection via RDP (or at least a VPN connection) would be more appropriate for connecting a single remote computer. I use RDP all the time from my Windows laptop while out of the office, but my Mac stays at home so I've never tried it from there.