It's Like, ESP for Your PC
Remote-access services let you log in to your home computer from anywhere
If Sunday's service at the Highland Baptist Church was going to come off as envisioned, some digital intervention was needed. The church staff was having trouble readying a PowerPoint presentation, says Jim Fisher, a member of the Florence, Ala., congregation who runs a PC business across town. So without leaving his office chair, Fisher reached through the Internet, took control of the church's computer, and fixed some backgrounds in the slides.
Such is the miracle of remote access, once a mysterious power of computing wizards like Fisher but now easy for ordinary souls to master. And it's also now free through services like logmein.com and mywebexpc.com. These sites make it simple to operate a distant computer as if you were sitting in front of it. Move your mouse wherever you are, and the cursor moves on the remote computer. Type and, with little or no delay, words appear on the distant PC. The desktop screen of your home computer appears in a window on the PC you're using, or you can have it fill your entire view, making it easy to forget you're working on a computer that isn't there. You can check E-mail on your home machine or edit a document--or E-mail the document to wherever you are.
More than a stupid PC trick, the services let you leave your laptop at your house--just log in to your home desktop from a computer at Aunt Barbara's beach house. Or, if you don't have a churchgoing techie to help, you can hire someone who uses one of these remote-access services to diagnose and treat your PC. Pay him $20 an incident, and Jabez Gan Ming Teik will provide worldwide tech support via remote control from his home in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
A pay phone. Just download a program from either website, run through a straightforward installation, and sign up for an account. It's about as easy as setting up instant messaging. Paid versions, which run $10 to $13 a month per PC, let you transfer files, print, or synchronize files between PC s.
For added security, WebEx's paid version will call your cellphone before allowing anyone onto your PC. With the free versions, two passwords protect your PC--one gets you into the service's website, the other into your computer. The services want broadband connections, and the target computer must be turned on. The services slip through network routers or firewalls, making corporate tech teams blanch.
Another service, at gotomypc.com, pioneered this type of Web-based remote control and is still the simplest and most reliable. But gotomypc offers only a 30-day free trial; otherwise, it's the costliest of the three at $20 per month. All three services are designed for target computers that run Windows, though all but mywebexpc allow you to do your fetching from a Mac or other systems using a Web browser as the middleman.
Logmein seems to work the fastest. But the magic isn't just speed; it's convenience. Ben Moore used to haul 30 miles from his home in Southaven, Miss., to help maintain his parents' PC. Now he does it through mywebexpc and sometimes, with their blessing, doesn't bother to tell them. "I just wait until after 9 at night, when they go to bed." So they all can sleep easy.
This story appears in the May 23, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.