How To Remote Manage Your Parent’s Computer

This is becoming a more common problem for many of us.

I’m proud that my mom has been using a computers for nearly a decade. But I’ve never been able to remote access and trouble shoot her computers. First it was an HP Pavillion Pentium III running Windows 98 and using dial-up Internet access. I got so fed up with that thing, I bought her a gently used Apple iBook and an Apple Airport Express to give her wireless access to a DSL connection. The last year and a half have been great since that upgrade.

But even with the hardware upgrades, I still couldn’t get any number of free remote management solutions to work. Why would I want to do this? To install the periodic operating system and sercurity patches and run general maintenance scripts to keep the iBook health and my mom less frustrated. Just last week she had to bring her iBook to me to troubleshoot a problem with sending emails.

I’ve played with variations of VNC, Chicken of the VNC, Hamacchi X to name only a few – recommended on MacCast and Mac Geek Gab. But I could never get any to work outside of my own local network. Spending big bucks on Apple Remote Desktop is out of the question (my stubborn pride).

I stumbled upon a solution that finally worked this week. Check out LogMeIn Free Mac Beta – promised to be free for life. I was able to walk my mom through the installation step-by-step thanks to handy screen shots on the Web site. I created the login account. She installed the software on her iBook. I used my Web browser to login. It was glorious.

This solution gives me control of the remote desktop but I can’t do file transfer with the free account. Don’t fear, there’s a LogMeIn Free for Windows too. Check out more solutions at Dear Cali.

Let me know if you find this helpful or if you have a great solution to share. Thanks.
-BD