I am interested in controlling a computer remotely. First off, I am simply interested in this as a hobby. I play with Linux a bit but I am not a whiz-bang programmer. I do like fooling about with these things. Beats golf any day. However, I do have a reason. I am trying to help my wife and a few relatives from time to time and often the only way is to go to their machine and do it. When I can touch the keyboard and look at their machine, there is no problem.
What happens when they are on the other side of the world? Or even upstairs and I don't feel like moving? One of the biggest problems is that we are not all using the same kind of computer. I have Windows and Linux at home, my wife uses a Mac and some of my relatives are using older machines but I am not certain exactly what they are. Is there something out there that can help me with all this?
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I have spent more than 20 years trying to help people with computers and certainly the most frustrating aspect of that has been talking to people over the phone. I felt a bit like the air traffic controller talking to the eight-year-old boy and trying to get him to land a Cessna, after dad had a heart attack. Well, you get the picture.
Today, this is no longer necessary. We can connect to computers on the other side of the world and take complete control of them. This obviously makes it considerably easier to fix problems. In fact, there are many different ways to do this. In a Windows-only environment, you can use Microsoft's own Remote Desktop. If you are using Microsoft, you must have a copy of Windows XP Professional running on the computer you plan to operate remotely and at least Windows 95, or a more recent version. You can click on the site and get detailed information from the horse's mouth.
Moving on to other operating systems means looking at things slightly differently. In fact, there is a product originally from the labs of the computer science department of Cambridge University. Called Real VNC (virtual network computing), it works on nearly every platform ever created for silicon. There is a free version out now and you can find what you want by hunting about on their site. The Mac version is hidden away on the site but I have given you a link to it.