Remote Desktop Alternatives

[Ayere]

Since Remote Desktop in Vista (Ultimate) will not work with Home Premium, is
there a reasonably priced program that can take up RD's slack and works
well? Something along the lines of PC Anywhere?

Thanks!

 

[Andrew McLaren]

Since Remote Desktop in Vista (Ultimate) will not work with Home Premium,
is there a reasonably priced program that can take up RD's slack and works
well? Something along the lines of PC Anywhere?

Hi Ayere

The most common alternative appears to be UltraVNC:

http://www.uvnc.com/

This is free (donation-ware), and adds security and some nice features to
the widely-used, cross-platform VNC protocol.

VNC itself was originally developed at Olivetti Research Lab in Cambridge,
UK (later acquired by AT&T, then tragically shut down by penny-pinching
bean-counters in 2002).

 

[Ayere]

Thanks, Andrew! I'll give it a shot. RD seems to work OK between a 4400 x2
with Vista Ultimate (controlling machine) and P4 3ghz XP Pro machine,
although it is a bit slubbish. Is the sluggishness normal behaviour?

Thanks again!

 

[Andrew McLaren]

Thanks, Andrew! I'll give it a shot. RD seems to work OK between a 4400 x2
with Vista Ultimate (controlling machine) and P4 3ghz XP Pro machine,
although it is a bit slubbish. Is the sluggishness normal behaviour?

Remote Desktop itself isn't normally "sluggish" ... but like any
client-server app, a big slice of it's performance will be determined by
network configuration. Eg: are the machines on the same LAN, or separated by
a WAN? Are they on a 10Mbps hub, or a Gigabit switch? And so on.

FWIW, I RDP into 3 or 4 machines (including an XP machine) which are all on
the same Gigabit switch as my main desktop machine, and the performance is
almost instantaneous: it's just like being logged in directly.

Under the Remote Desktop Options, there's an "Experience" tab, where you can
tweak various settings to get the best performance. You could try fiddling
with those a bit. Otherwise it would be a matter of getting a network trace,
to see where the lag was in the network performance.

Hope it helps a bit,

 

[Ayere]

Remote Desktop itself isn't normally "sluggish" ... but like any
client-server app, a big slice of it's performance will be determined by
network configuration. Eg: are the machines on the same LAN, or separated
by a WAN? Are they on a 10Mbps hub, or a Gigabit switch? And so on.

FWIW, I RDP into 3 or 4 machines (including an XP machine) which are all
on the same Gigabit switch as my main desktop machine, and the performance
is almost instantaneous: it's just like being logged in directly.

Under the Remote Desktop Options, there's an "Experience" tab, where you
can tweak various settings to get the best performance. You could try
fiddling with those a bit. Otherwise it would be a matter of getting a
network trace, to see where the lag was in the network performance.

Hope it helps a bit,

Indeed it does help, Andrew, and thanks for the pointers. Justing knowing
that the performance you speak of is attainable is valuable.

Ayere

 

[Andrew McLaren]

Indeed it does help, Andrew, and thanks for the pointers. Justing knowing

that the performance you speak of is attainable is valuable.

Cool. Let us know if you run into follow-up questions!

Cheers,