LogMeIn: A remote desktop program to solve all your problems.

I'm going to tell you a sad, sad story. But it has a happy ending.

Once upon a time there was a college student who had a laptop. He doesn't have a desktop, just a laptop that's used for everything. Now he carried this laptop around for about ~6 months. During this time period, the AC adapter started to do funny things. You had to move it around in weird places to make it charge, pray over it, and hope for the right phase of the moon for it to work. Other compatible AC adapters worked fine (it's good to have computer science friends), so it was definitely the culprit.

So he got another one. This one came with a light, so he could know if the AC adapter was working. And everything was good for another few months. But then funny things happened again, only this time it wasn't the AC adapter. It was the connection between the laptop and the AC adapter this time, and that wasn't a very nice thing. You had to wiggle it around to make it work, so he looked very foolish when having to work with his computer science peers...

One day, after acquiring a second monitor, he decided to permanently ground the laptop. Stuck it on a desk, hooked everything up, and just leave it in one place. So now it's a desktop. A really bad desktop.

A problem remained: How to do programming related work when all of the cool tools (Visual Studio, eclipse, source control, various libraries etc.) were on the laptop?

His solution: remote desktop (but not the Windows remote desktop program, since you can't remotely connect to a computer running Vista home).

So there are a lot of remote desktop programs out there, and I'm going to share my experiences using LogMeIn, an RDP that's very convenient (and includes a free version).

I've been using this program for several months now, and here are the highlights of it:

• Easy to use UI -- a nice thing to have
• Plugins for IE/FireFox on Windows and Macs -- Convenient, since there are plenty of those systems on campus.
• Java front-end -- A big plus when you can't install plug-ins, I've used it on RedHat Linux, Windows, and Macs. No installation of any components necessary.
• Seamless -- supports clipboard transferring, audio, file transfer, etc. 
• Multiple monitor support -- You can switch between them
• Free -- with restrictions, but adequate for general use

 I've used this program a lot for working on projects through Visual Studio and Eclipse, and the experience is very nice.So if you're looking for a good RDP, go ahead and check out LogMeIn.



Disclaimer: I was not paid by anyone to write this up, I just really like the software!