Accessing my big PC from my small one...

[starbase1]

One of the problems for us graphical types with laptops is that we like lots of horsepower for all our rendering etc.

And while things like netbooks are delightfully cheap and portable, they are also very low in terms of processing power. And even more expensive ones are probably no match for your main beastie at home.

So, in these days of mobile broadband, why not take over the big one from the small one?

There are clearly going to be some issues in terms of things like displays being compressed for transmission and the like, so you're not going to be able to do stuff like fine tune the colour balance on a delicate image to get the skin tones just so, but it seems to me there are still going to be a lot of advantages.

Has anyone else gone down that route?

I've just tried setting up the free version of 'LogMeIn', and the delightful thing is that it works pretty much immediately. The worst part is that my portable machine has a much lower screen resolution, though I hope to get used to panning around a bit as I go on.

Has anyone else tried alternate services or systems?

Nick

[akademus]

I use both LogMeIn and TeamViewer.

Last one seems to work much faster and can show your full screen on smaller laptop, but it has sometimes issues with connecting to remote computer, so I use LogMeIn to see if everything is ok overthere. I don't really work remotely, but it's quite handy to put the files on studio's render farm from home and these two apps saved me a lot of coming back to studio to fix this or that (I won't mention I live 15 minutes of walk from there, but anyhow :D ). I have 2Mbit links on both sides and it's still to slow to work like you would if you're sitting in front of station.

Since I have HP workstations, there is HP solution to this, but there still is no vista or 64-bit, so I'm still waiting for that.

hope this helps

Interesting topic, though. I'd like to hear some more experiences in this field.

[starbase1]

I tried TeamViewer and found it a disaster, complained about a proxy (there wasn't one), interfered with my browsing, and then I stated getting endless 'disk does not exist' messages from the OS. Uninstalling did not fix, and I ended doing a system restore.

[Von Polygon]

I've used RealVNC for this previously without any issues.