Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

Even though I do 99% of my work at the office, there are always instances when I need to access my computer away from the office for one reason or another. My main computer is PC and my laptop is a MacBookPro, so I have tried several different remote access programs over the years in an attempt to get the best experience and connection between the two systems and platforms.

When I was on my PowerBook, I tried using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection. It was so unbearably slow that I ended up ditching that and using a VNC solution (TightVNC Server and Chicken Of The VNC client). When I moved to my MacBookPro, I kept using VNC until Parallels came along. With it, I was able to boot into XP and connect via the RDC client in XP. This was almost as fast as sitting at my computer since it was essentially connecting XP to XP. I have used this solution for almost a year now and it was been great. The only drawback was having to boot Parallels each time I wanted to remote into my computer at work.

Microsoft recently released a beta version 2 of its RDC software for Mac. It makes great improvements over the previous version. First and foremost, it is Universal, which means it can run natively on the new Intel platform or the PowerPC-based Macs. The RDC 2 Beta not only lets you set your screen size higher (up to full screen), you can do so without having to reset the connection.

One of the nicest features I have found is the file transfer option. RDC will allow you to share a folder on your mac with the remote computer you are connecting to. This facilitates transferring files between the remote windows computer and your Mac. Before, I would have to transfer files from the windows computer to an FTP, then download from that FTP to my Mac.

There are plenty of other features that are much improved, including support for multiple sessions, better compatibility with Vista, and printer support that allows you to print to any printer on your Mac.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at August 06,2007 @ 11:10 am and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.