Remote Desktop and Efficiency

talking_walnut

Hey,

I need to set up some remote access for a computer as part of a college project and I was looking for advice on what software to use.

I need to find software that will be as efficient as possible as there will be other computers using the same connection whose continual connection must be guaranteed. In other words I can't hog the bandwidth.

Remote Desktop access is preferable to simply sshing in as there's a few programs I'll be running on it that are GUI (stupid Windows).

At the moment I'm looking at Windows own Remote Desktop software and NoMachine NX. I've heard Windows Remote Desktop is actually pretty efficient but I'm wondering how they stack up against each other? Or does someone know of any other software that might be better?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Spear

talking_walnut wrote: »

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

What about good old VNC in one flavour or another?

talking_walnut

NX is more efficient. That's why I ruled it out

zilog_jones

RDP is pretty efficient, and free. You can make it use less bandwidth by decreasing colour and turning off sound and stuff. However personally I wouldn't recommend using it over the internet without more encryption or going over a VPN or something.

How much bandwidth do you have?

Snowbat

Since the server component of NX runs only on X Window System and the server component of Remote Desktop runs only on Windows, your choice entirely depends on which OS is running on the machine you need to connect to. Clients are available for multiple platforms.

Both systems are quite usable over a dialup connection so I'd say they stack up pretty evenly.

talking_walnut

Thanks for the replies guys. Not sure how much bandwidth I have to play so just trying to be as frugal as possible.

@Snowbat
I hadn't realised NX was just for X Windows. Thanks for pointing that out.

The server will be running Windows XP. Unfortunately it has to run it. I think I'll just see if I can install an ssh server to begin with. Wish it could run Linux. I'm a lot more comfortable with this kind of stuff in it

Playboy

Visionapp Remote Desktop is great + its free

Khannie

Windows remote desktop is pretty decent. I found nothing better when I was using windows for telecommuting. NX is better (I use it all the time) and highly configurable depending on how much bandwidth you want to use, but as has been pointed out, the server has to be running X.