As our schedules get even tighter than before and we face an increasing number of demands from our employers, many people find themselves having to work weekends. It’s a drag to have spend what used to be your free time working, but you might be able to make it better if you were able to access your work PC from your home computer. You could work when it was convenient for you, take a number of breaks and not have to leave your home. I was discussing setting up an arrangement like this with one of my co-workers who expressed to me that they did not even know it was possible. Here’s a quick primer on what remote connections are and how they can make your life easier.

Connect Remotely

When you set up a remote connection, you are opening a connection to another computer that allows you to control that computer from elsewhere. You will have full control over all of the functions, including powering the computer on and off. Opening a remote connection is nothing to play around with – if done incorrectly, you could be opening the backdoor to viruses and hackers. You have to make sure that the programs you use to create the connection are secure.

While remote connections are great for doing work from home, they do have some limitations. You will find that performance can be a little slow, so you cannot use too  many resource intensive programs. For instance, I cannot use Dreamweaver remotely very well. It works, but really really slowly. However, it works great for things like email, opening files remotely, even word processing. The number one benefit – I can access shared network drives on my work’s intranet, which I would be unable to do without the remote connection.

Added Benefits

One of the things that remote connections will allow you to do that many people do not consider is troubleshoot PCs for others remotely. I routinely have to help my parents through really minor computer problems and I hate having to walk them through it on the phone or drive over there to fix it myself. So to save myself some of the hassle, I installed a remote connection software on their computer. It allows me to tell them to simply start running the program, then I connect and can solve the problem without leaving home or having to walk them through it. It might become the quick and easy repair answer for many burgeoning IT professionals.

All this week, we’ll address some of the benefits, drawbacks and best solutions for remote connections. We’ll give you a run down of some of the best software, some tips on how to get it up and running, and even some ways of using a remote connection that you may not have considered before.