Remote Adminstrator
By Rick LaBanca

A big aspect of home automation is computer control. While some software like HomeSeer provide web interfaces, the ultimate is to have complete control of your remote machine. Usually not for normal situations, but for when things go wrong!

For me, I have two uses, one is to get to my office computer to run long conversions, and second to get to my home machine.

Many have heard of PC-Anywhere, and Carbon Copy (is that still around?), but boy PC-Anywhere has gotton priced through the roof, around $150 last time I checked! I was using TightVNC which is free, and faster than the standard open source VNC.

Fast and cheap!

Recently I tried Remote Administrator though. $35 bucks, and it's the fastest I've used. Now I'm cable modem going to a lan at work, so I've got it pretty good there, and I can't say how a modem performs (perhaps someone can add that to this review). But it does a great job.

Setup is easy and uncomplicated. The normal install program runs, answer the questions, and reboot. You are offered the option to run it as a service, which means on windows 9x or ME, it will be there if you have a login screen, and more importantly on NT or Win2000 you can have access to the mandatory login.

The Client Viewer

To access the remote computer you run the viewer, put in the IP address, and you're off and running.

Once connected you have full control, and screen updates are very good. It didn't recognize and send my mouse wheel though.

Notice in this screen shot that you have other ways to connect. Aside from full control, you can view only, telnet in, or file transfer. I haven't tried shutdown yet, not sure if that reboots or actually shuts down. That option is odd since you could just control the machine and shut it down normally anyway.

I also found out that telnet is only available for an NT host.

More Client-->