just an asterisk

This post is dedicated to President Obama, who had the decency to visit Turkey on the same day as me and who closed down all the roads, sequestering me back to hotel early to finish my work and with time to write. Thanks!

I’d like to introduce you to LogMeIn Free, a product from the company LogMeIn that will change your life. There are several products out there that allow you to log into your home PC or Mac over the internet. This is called accessing a “remote desktop”. I can think of three solid reasons that you’d want to do this (or at least want to have the option of doing this):

1. You want to get at something on your home computer, a document or music file that you want to share, or an email that you’ve saved. If you have an gmail account and your computer at home is online, this is a piece of cake.
2. You want to check your bank balances, update your taxes, or access your personal email inbox but you’re in a public location and don’t want anyone to be able to track your activities (trust me… they can).
3. You want to use software that you’ve only installed at home. I do this for expensive or large applications that I don’t want clogging up my personal laptop.

That last one might not be as universal as the first two, but hopefully you are starting to appreciate the possibilities here. Remember that you are accessing your home computer as if you were actually at the keyboard, so anything you would do at home, you can do here (except video – read on for that one…). Here is a demo to watch for a better look.

Getting Started
If I’ve convinced you to give it a shot, here are the basic steps for how to setup LogMeIn:

1. Start on the computer you want to control. Go to this link and enter enough information to create a free account…
2. Download the software and install it. You may have to restart your machine (maybe not).
3. Go to another PC or Mac. Open the browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer work best). Go to Logmein.com and sign in. You should see your remote machine listed. Click on it to start a remote session.

It’s that easy!!!

Nothing is perfect

• Not all browsers work perfectly. I’m a huge fan of Google Chrome, but these two do not play nicely together… I’m sure that there are plenty of other examples out there. Stick with Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer and you should be golden.
• Some internet connections are too slow. It’s a sad fact that some internet connections are just going to be too slow to handle the magic of remote desktop computing. A general rule of thumb is that if a YouTube video can play, LogMeIn should work too…
• Technically, your IT guy at work might get a bit tichy if you try this… The beauty of LogMeIn is that you bypass all of the security restrictions that your IT guy may have spent a considerable time putting in place. You connect out to your remote machine and then you have exactly the same access as you would at home. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
• No connection is fast enough to support video. This is not a service that you can use to watch Youtube videos if your employer has blocked access to web video. The refresh rate (how many times per second that a new image is displayed on the screen) is very high for videos but low for LogMeIn. The results (if you don’t belive me) is not going to be pretty…

Ok so that about covers it. Enjoy playing with your new toy. Don’t get caught by IT. Feel free to post any other reasons to use LogMeIn in the comments.

~ab

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 10:59 am and is filed under Software, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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