Remote Desktop

Gee with everything else going on around here, I forgot to tell you all about my trial run with Remote Desktop last night. It’s not exactly as sure-fire simple as the Sales guys made it out to be the few times I asked about it. First I setup the XP box at work to accept incoming connections, pretty easy on that end. Then I went home and grabbed a copy of Remote Desktop Client and installed it on the laptop with Win 2000. So far, so good. I opened up the program and found the first issue, there is no place within the program itself to configure your connection settings. It assumes a connection to the internet is already present and asks for a computer name or IP address. There are no “dial-up” configurations. Hmm, problem. The work machine is not directly accessible from the internet. I go back to the MS page and read through the directions, again, all the directions assume an internet connection, not a dial-up. This is not at all what I was told. I was definitely told that you could dial directly to the PC you wanted to remotely control, but there’s no settings for the dial-up connection.

I then get an idea. What if I dialed into that computer, connected to it using DUN, and then tried to open up the Remote Desktop connection using the IP address? Bingo! That’s the way it works for a direct telephone connection! (Don’t look for the documentation for that, I never did find it!) So after all of that just to get connected, I was in no mood to play around with it too much, but I managed to get it loaded and run a database query to see how quickly it would run. The initial loading of the remote screen is slow over the dialup. I’m not sure how much of that is due to XP’s more intense use of graphics, but it was slow. Once the screen loaded though, speed was pretty good. I ran the database query and it ran on the remote system, so it was at the same speed I would normally get at work, and the resulting screen came across the phone line just as quickly. I checked Outlook and opened up a game of freecell and everything seemed pretty good. So I figure it’ll be good for working from home at times, I just need to factor in the slow startup. (Grab a sandwich or beer or whatever while the screen loads, eh? *L*)

OK back to re-imaging my old machine, it’s almost done..:)

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