Working from home offers greater flexibility, less stress and
increased productivity. One of the key tools of any mobile worker
is remote control software
The problem never goes away. No matter how careful you are,
there will come a time when you're working at home and the file you
need is on the computer at the office. Or you'll be doing technical
support for a user in another city, and you need to have a look at
exactly what his machine is doing.
If you have remote-control software on both PCs (the same program (
they're not interchangeable, unfortunately), then that file, or a
peek at his screen, is only a phone call (or other connection) and
a mouse click away. You can dial in, seize control of the other
computer, call up its document on your screen and control its
actions through your local keyboard and mouse. File transfers
become a drag-and-drop exercise, no more complicated than copying
the file to a floppy disk. Remote-control software works by
redirecting keystrokes and screen images to a communications line,
so whoever is on the other end of the line can type commands that
run on the remote system, from the comfort of their own home, and
see the result on their home PC screen. It often works across
operating systems, so, for example, someone on their home 486 PC
running Windows 3.1 can control their office Windows 95 Pentium,
run its 32-bit programs, and work with its interface. If the remote
machine is on a network, you can even map network drives and work
with their files.
Making the connectionYou can connect to a
remote PC, depending on the remote-control software you're using,
over a dial-up line, a direct serial or parallel cable connection,
or various flavours of local area network (LAN). The world of
remote access and remote-control software expanded exponentially
with the advent of the Internet, when TCP/IP networks suddenly
became worldwide.Now many remote-control programs include an
Internet component. This is especially useful when you have a
direct connection to the Web, such as Wave (Internet access via
cable modem), or a LAN hookup. Of course, particularly when
operating over a public network such as the Internet, security is
important. All of the programs allow you to protect the host PC
with user IDs and passwords, and even offer the option, at the end
of a session, to reboot the machine to ensure that there are no
residual back doors.
Buyer's bonus?When Computer Associates
bought Cheyenne, along with the well-known backup software, it also
picked up a remote-control product called Remotely Possible. The
current version, 4.0, includes support for both 16- and 32-bit
systems, over modem (Windows 95 and NT only), TCP/IP, IPX
(NetWare), or NetBIOS (Microsoft networking). You can have multiple
instances of the program running at once, which allows you to work
with several remote systems simultaneously.If a machine is hosting
several remote-control sessions, only one can control it, while the
others watch ( an ideal training scenario. The controlling machine
can pass control to one of the others at any time. You can also
record and play back sessions. Controlling a remote computer over a
dial-up link, Windows 95 to Windows 95, was straightforward. The
software automatically pans if you're working in full-screen mode
and the machine you're dialed into is running at a higher
resolution. Screen painting is somewhat leisurely, but colours and
icons are accurate and crisp.
More buying powerTo prove that
the problem was neither computer nor phone line, the same transfer
was undertaken with the next product, Compaq Carbon Copy 32. Yes,
it's the same Compaq we know as a hardware manufacturer ( it
acquired this product when it bought Microcom recently.Carbon Copy
is a mature program, and it happily transferred the 5Mb file, at
about 2,500cps, without a hiccup. And its interface, a four-pane
Windows Explorer-like drag-and-drop setup, was simple to understand
and use. There's also a synchronisation option that simply copies
differences between two files or directories, speeding up the
transfer. You can restrict the available files and directories, for
security.Carbon Copy's remote control was also robust. It works
over modem, IPX or TCP/IP networking, RAS, or direct cable
connection (there's even a parallel cable in the box). ILS
(Internet Locator Service) support lets you find other Carbon Copy
PCs on the Internet, without knowing their IP addresses and Voice
Chat lets you talk to the person at the other end, without losing
your data connection. Interestingly, Carbon Copy seems to force its
host to work at remote-control speed ( that is, the host painted
its screen and performed commands much more slowly than it would
have, had it been running without Carbon Copy active. It looks odd,
but in most cases you won't see the phenomenon because you'll be at
a distance. As an added bonus, if you own a Windows CE HPC, you can
use it to control your personal computer (slowly), through the
included Pocket Carbon Copy.
Reach out and control
someoneStac's ReachOut Enterprise 8.0 (or rather, 8.02 ( for
modem use, you really need the patches found on Stac's website) is
the latest incarnation of a product that has also been around for a
while. It supports the widest range of connections, including
NetWare, TCP/IP, Microsoft, Banyan VINES, and other NetBIOS or
NetBEUI networks, regular or ISDN modem, direct cable, infrared
(Windows 95 only), or remote-access server. It provides solid, fast
connections through a relatively simple interface, although
connections are a bit messy to set up. It's not that the exercise
is complex ( you just have to fiddle with things in unexpected
places. For example, the modem type in a connection's icon had to
be adjusted after telling the program which modem to use ( you'd
think the information would have carried over. Carbon Copy's Phone
Book connection organisation is somewhat easier to operate,
although it had its own idiosyncrasies.In remote-control mode,
ReachOut's screen refreshes are faster than Carbon Copy's, and no
less accurate. It does not offer automatic panning, as Remotely
Possible does, but it can scale the remote desktop to the
controlling machine's screen (fonts and icons tend to be illegible,
however, if the host resolution is high). But colours are
reproduced faithfully, with no weird artifacts. File transfers use
a four-pane, Windows Explorer-like interface, and run slightly
faster than Carbon Copy's at about 2,800-2,900cps. A 1.69Mb file
took about 10 minutes, one minute faster than Carbon Copy's effort.
(c) 1999 Adaptec Inc.Compiled by Paul Phillips