Cheers Guys I could have Googled it but hey Ho !

I did use Logmein for a few years; but prefer TeamViewer, without trying any others.

With TeamViewer, you can organise the two or more PCs in to a group, so that as long as the remote device is switched on and TV running, you can log-in without having to phone/Skype your mother.

I have used it across 5 PCs running various versions of Windows; and also another running Ubuntu Linux, the latter having some slight restrictions.

I have not used it to/from any others such as Mac etc.

It has three distinct modes of working, of which I generally use VPN.

More remotely, I have used it to access my son's PC about 500 miles away, using the temporary form, set up using e-mail; and requiring additional passwords, ie his PC is not part of my local group, although I get automatic notification of when he starts up his PC!

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I also find it particularly useful to effectively enlarge the screen of my ASUS Netbook, if I want to do some thing finicky on that, hence avoiding having to find VGA cables and the like.

Edited by deleted (Tue 08-Sep-15 15:24:36)

Your mum will need to download vncserver and install it - set a password etc. Once she starts vncserver, it will tell you the IP address to connect to, and she will need to tell you this and the password.

You can then use vnc to access her machine and control the mouse / keyboard etc. I'm not sure if it will work across NAT etc - someone else may be able to answer that better as I only use it on a VPN with Macbooks at both ends.

This is where Teamviewer is better IMHO, you just need a user name and password, no messing with IP addresses. A bit like Skype (which allows displaying your screen to a remote user, but Skype does not allow interacting in any way, but you can still talk at the same time.) Skype is however useful as you can use it for voice at the same time as Teamviewer / vnc.

Oh and get rid of Outlook. It's awful, on a Windows box Thunderbird is much simpler, and on a Mac avoid all MS tools, they're dead slow!

The VNC ports would need to be forwarded on the router to the PC IP address. And it will be the public IP address that would be needed rather than the private IP. Also, if it isn't a static IP then might need a service like DynDNS to get a DNS host address for the IP that updates when the IP changes.

So, more work than for some of the other services. The benefit of VNC is that you aren't using 3rd party servers at any point. Logmein and GoToAssist both use 3rd party servers to avoid the effort of setting up port forwarding etc (and I assume Teamviewer does as well although I've never looked at that one).

In reply to a post by keith969:

and on a Mac avoid all MS tools, they're dead slow!

I'm not sure what you mean by this as I'm running Win 10 on my Macbook Pro at full speed.

I use the native OSX Windows Office tools from Microsoft (sometimes). Sounds like you are running a W10 virtual machine on your mac? IMHO Microsoft in the last 20 years deliberately crippled the speed of Office on Macs. Or, they just didn't understand how to port their code correctly.

I write code for both Windows, Linux and OSX. It runs just as fast on all of them. But then this is using a good third party gui toolkit (Qt) rather than the rubbish MS use.

Mac equivalents to Office are much faster, can write Office formats for Excel/Powerpoint/Word and are generally easier to use. I have them on my Mac, but rarely use them.

Also the Mac ones are free

It uses Bootcamp.