My wife uses PC Anywhere mainly, but has used Go To My PC, and I have used PC Anywhere to work with my clients remotely for years. They are very similar. Go To My PC worked well for her. I would think that PC Anywhere is more of a "standard" with years of security history.

You might try Go To My PC for a while to see what you think. What ever you do, consider setting it up on a separate PC on a network with very restrictive access to your other files. Like setting up some drive "shares" that can read-only your content on the main image repository folder.

You would definitely not want to consider using it for video file transfers, unless they are extremely short, compressed clips.

If you have XP Pro, Remote desktop is excellent. You can access the machine with XP Home machines. Google on how to enable it. I find it to be faster than UltraVNC, but not every computer has the Remote Desktop thing installed.

VNC and its variants like UltraVNC are free and also good. You can access the computer from a web Java client. I have both installed on my computer, so its the best of both worlds.

With any of these sorts of programs, do port forwarding on your router if you have one. Get dynamic DNS from dyndns.org or similar sites (namecheap.com is good if you need domain registration, they give a free dynamic DNS client).

I did some consulting a little over a year ago with a software start-up that was going to produce a competitor to GoToMyPC. Also, I ran a software company ten years ago that produced software that competed with PC Anywhere, Co/Session, and dozens of others.

I am very familiar with these, as well as the Remote Desktop and older Netmeeting technology in Windows.

The main problem with all of these -- and the main problem that Go To My PC solves -- is how to get to a PC at work that sits behind a firewall that the IT manager controls, and which you cannot reconfigure. Any attempt to initiate a session from outside your business will fail, because the firewall will see an incoming packet without any matching outgoing request, and will reject it as an attempt to compromise the network.

What Go To My PC does (and lots of other companies, like Tumbleweed, do this same trick) is to install a client on the computer behind the firewall that contacts the Go To My PC server. This client contacts the Go To My PC server when it first starts. This provides the necessary outgoing connection. Then, you log into the Go To My PC server with your remote computer (using just a browser), and give the server your authentication credentials. The server then sends information to the client, which is seen by the router as a response to the outgoing request and is therefore allowed.

Thus, the whole key is to have an intermediary server, located outside the corporate firewall. Since Go To My PC has to maintain this server, they charge a monthly fee, which is why this solution is expensive.

If you want to use the other technologies mentioned (like PC Anywhere), then you will either have to subscribe to their service (I think Symantec may now be offering a service), or you have to convince the IT manager to open a hole in the firewall for you to operate through (unlikely in most business setups).

Go To My PC works very well, but it IS expensive.

I don't recall who pointed me to RealVNC, it may have been you, Chien.

IT ROCKS.

I have the free version on all my home//office networked PC's and the only thing that I can't do with it is view a video.

Steve

Here's another one--LogMeIn.

There are two versions, free and pay. The free one does everything but file transfers, but if you need a file you just put it in an email to yourself.

I've dabbled with the others mentioned above, and find LogMeIn to be the easiest, by far. And did I mention that IT'S FREE!? Highly rated by recent PC Magazine reviews.

LogMeIn suffers from one thing that I try to always avoid - it requires a third-party in the connection.

If the third party goes belly-up, so does your connection. If the third party decides that it needs to force the users to upgrade (I.E., we need a shot in the cashflow, time for an upgrade), then with a minor protocol tweak, all older versions are no longer useable. If the third party is purchased by a larger corporation, then the ongoing operation of the existing protocols is not guaranteed.

With RealVNC, you own the software at both ends of the connection and there is no "service" in the middle.

Steve

With RealVNC, you own the software at both ends of the connection and there is no "service" in the middle.

That is certainly to be desired, but can you operate the remote computer unattended when it resides behind a firewall that your IT manager will not configure in order to open a port to your application?

There are many ways to operate a remote computer, but when the conditions described in the previous paragraph are true, there has to be a third computer involved.

I use UltraVNC which is an cousin to RealVNC.
We chose it because it can use Window's built-in user/password
security to access allowed folders only.

I am told that RealVnc may have added this to their free version now.

I run VNC at work. I agree it works great and very fast.