Working away from the office
Although I do most of my work here at the office, there are times when I am on vacation or just out of town visiting family that I need to get some work done. In the past, when my laptop was a PC, i would just fire up PCAnywhere, connect to my computer here at the office, and do what I needed to do.
Now that my laptop is a Mac, I am having trouble finding a solution that works. I know about Apples Remote Desktop utility, but It only connects with WindowsXP. My main production machine here at the office is Windows 2000, and I hadn’t really thought about upgrading. I do have a second machine under my desk running XP, so maybe the solution is just to connect to it and get files I need using that machine as my gateway to the network.
Our servers were also just recently upgraded to Windows2003, which Remote Desktop also works with.
What about running VirtualPC and a copy of PCAnywhere on my Powerbook? Is that a viable option? Looking for some feedback on what others have done in this situation, or if they have even been faced with it.
October 25th, 2004
If security is not a huge concern, use VNC. It works on both Windows and Mac platforms and is much faster and easier IMHO than PCAnywhere. It’s still pretty safe to use, although I think there is no encryption. I recommend RealVNC for Windows and Chicken of the VNC for Mac. I use both daily.
October 25th, 2004
Are you just trying to bring your mac in and connect it to your PC? Hmmm, my laptop PC and my Mac tower see each other fine via file sharing… if virtual connect, I’m not sure — I would call Apple Store online, they’ll offer you a million products — then you can cross reference to your hearts content:)
October 25th, 2004
Thanks for the recommendations guys.
Brady - I am talking about connecting to my PC (or even just our network) while I am out of the office, for getting files to work on.
When I had a PC laptop, I would login to my computer here via PCAnywhere, and do a file transfer to my laptop.
October 25th, 2004
I would suggest UltraVNC as a Windows-Windows solution (I, too, use Chicken-of-the-vnc on my Mac, with many quizzical comments from people who notice its name). It includes file transfer capability (though somewhat rudimentary, it does not recurse IIRC), and (as I checked the site just a moment ago) works with a Windows-Windows stream encryption plugin.
In terms of speed, it’s roughly the same as TightVNC and marginally faster than RealVNC.
No idea on a Mac-Windows solution given the parameters so far - is (s)FTP not an option?