Happy Fall, everyone! If you live in the Northeast, I hope that you didn’t wash away in the deluge this weekend. It feels like fall now…leaves turning, Halloween decorations out, cooler weather. Time to settle in for the race to the New Year (yikes!). When I was shopping the other day, the entire front wall of a big, box store was Christmas Trees. WHAT?!?!? It’s not even Halloween yet! Seriously, I can’t stand it!!
But you’re not here to discuss the weather or upcoming holiday schedule.
To the topic at hand: I feel like one of the biggest challenges that I have in managing a wide variety of devices (I have four that I work with consistently – my laptop, my smartphone, an iPad and a Windows Surface tablet) is that the information or program I want is on a DIFFERENT device than the one that I’m on. Perhaps I have a program on one device that doesn’t run on the other device (e.g. Office on the iPad). Maybe a program is quite expensive and I don’t want to own multiple licenses.
I know that I can use Dropbox (or a similar online data service) to store information (If you don’t know what Dropbox is, or why it’s important, please check out this post: http://www.yourtechtamer.com/blog/2012/09/dropbox-what-is-it-why-do-you-have-to-have-it/), but that doesn’t handle having to license the programs themeselves multiple times to install them on different devices (assuming that that program is available for multiple devices types). Additionally, some data is massive in nature (e.g. videos, music, photos, databases) and you may not want to pay for the space required to store it (personally, I have almost a terrabyte of data [that’s 1000 GB/gigabytes of data], and I don’t care to pay for an outside service to store it all. I don’t need to access much of it regularly, but when I do, I need it!). Maybe you just forgot to save the data to your online storage site. Maybe the data is sensitive and you don’t want it “out there”.
Regardless of your reason for not having every program and piece of data on every device, there is a wonderful, FREE tool (free for personal use, commercial usage requires payment) that allows you access to your PC from virtually any device. Enter Teamviewer.
Teamviewer allows you to control your PC (and thereby, run ALL of your PC programs) from almost any type of device. Whether that’s totally practical or not is up to you (personally, I really can’t do anything from my smartphone…just too small). The idea is that you CAN IF YOU WANT/NEED TO.
Rick Broida, a terrific author on CNET, created a terrific step-by-step. Rather than recreating it here, I’ll let you check out his article, “How to Control Your PC from Your iPad for Free“. Rick has laid out all the step-by-step instructions (with pictures and suggested settings). Download Teamviewer from Teamviewer.com and away you go!
Once you’ve installed and configured Teamviewer, you can access your PC from almost any of your other devices with just a few simple “clicks” (or taps). No longer is that critical piece of information “back home” when you need it HERE!
3 Comments
Yeah, remote support technology is so advanced today that one can access their computers from anywhere anytime using tools like RHUB, logmein, TeamViewer, GoToMyPC etc.
We set up our laptop as a nannycam and used teamviewer from all of our other devices to watch what was going on in our house. it gave a great deal of security
We recently switched to TeamViewer for remote support for our clients and it’s a great tool.