Windows Remote Access Basics

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 computerthe 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.

• Dialing direct. The remote computer can dial the host PC directly, modem to modem, becoming part of the network at the host location. At that point, you can access shared folders.

  The downside? The host PC must have its own phone line that only it answers. Otherwise, its modem answers every incoming phone call, occasionally blasting the ears of hapless human callers. No wonder this is becoming a less common connection method.

• Virtual private networking (VPN). Using this system, you don't have to make a direct connection from the remote PC to the host. Instead, you use the Internet as an intermediary. You avoid long-distance charges, and the host PC doesn't have to have its own phone line. Once again, the remote computer behaves exactly as though it has joined the network of the system you're dialing into.

• 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 Vista, 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).

Note, by the way, 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 Windows Meeting Space. It's easier to set up and works even with Windows Vista Home Basic on either end, yet offers the same kind of "screen sharing" as Remote Desktop.