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Being able to remotely access and control your PC from your Palm OS handheld can be extremely useful.
For example, you can lookup information in a document during a meeting or check for new email
before performing a more time consuming HotSync. Remote control is sort of the Jack-of-all-trades
for remote access; it's not always as good as specialized remote access solutions
for such things as document management or email but it fills the gap for the countless situations when
other solutions don't exist or don't quite meet your need.
Mergic VPN doesn't provide a built-in remote control capability but it does provide the connectivity
you need to securely pass through your firewall and access your PC.
Two excellent remote control products for the Palm OS are PalmVNC and Win-Hand.
Both are compatible with Mergic VPN, prices start as low as free, and they both support
advanced features such as zooming in and out of the PC screen (A.K.A scaling), as well as
multiple gray scale and 256 color modes.
PalmVNC
PalmVNC is part of the VNC family
of servers and clients. All of the VNC products are licensed under the GNU
General Public License
as published by the Free Software foundation. This entitles you to use the software free of charge and
it means that source code for PalmVNC is also freely available. There are two versions of PalmVNC available:
PalmVNC is quite reliable and manages to work on a lot of Palm devices but development stopped
after support of the Palm V and Palm IIIc models.
PalmVNC 2.0 is the latest version of PalmVNC and
with added support for Palm OS 5 and the latest high resolution Palm and Sony displays. Although
the product continues to distributed under the GNU General Public License, the developer providing the
update is asking for a small fee to show your appreciation and to receive email updates and support.
Both distributions of PalmVNC come with a Windows server and the clients are also compatible with VNC Servers for
Macintosh and UNIX workstations. The VNC
server environment is very complete and reboots from the handheld are fully supported.
Win-Hand
Win-Hand also supports hi-res displays,
Palm OS 5 and is distributed with a Windows server. Win-Hand is faster than PalmVNC but Macintosh and UNIX workstations are not supported and the Win-Hand client is not compatibile with
VNC servers.
There is a free evaluation version of Win-Hand that never expires but it does not support
security. The lack of security means
that anyone with access to the same network as your PC can remote control it with another Win-Hand
client. If your PC is behind a firewall and there are no other PCs on your LAN
or if you really, really trust everyone on your network (i.e. a home LAN) than you can use Mergic VPN
to provide secure access across the Internet to your LAN and just use the free version.
Otherwise, after you've decided you want Win-Hand you'll need to purchase a commercial version of the product.
Remote Control Usage Tips
Since your handheld has a small screen
compared to your PC and you are most likely using a slow wireless connection,
using remote control efficiently takes some practice.
Here are some tips that we think will improve your remote control experience:
-
Remove any desktop background image. Setting the background to a solid
color will dramatically reduce the amount of data that must be sent to your handheld.
- Reduce the screen resolution on your desktop computer to 800 x 600 or even 640 x 480 before
using remote control.
This will improve performance and readability when zooming/scaling and moving around the
desktop screen. In Windows XP you can even automatically force your desktop to 640 x 480 mode
when you start the remote control server by right clicking its program icon, selecting Properties
and picking the "Run in 640 x480 screen resolution" option on the Compatibility tab.
- If you're using Win-Hand on a color Palm OS device then try reducing the Palm display
to "16 Shades of gray". Although you'll lose the capability of displaying the desktop in
color the readability is still quite good and, since there's less information
to transmit to your handheld, performance will be improved.
- If you know you're going to use an application remotely then before you leave your PC
start the application and move/resize its window to make it easier to view on your handheld.
- Experiment with and get to know your remote control client's zooming/scaling and
navigation features. If you leave your zoom ratio at 1:1 and just pan around your desktop screen
then it's pretty doubtful you'll find remote control from a handheld very useful.
- Enable Mergic VPN's Auto Connect feature (found in Mergic VPN's Options menu) for
your remote control client. This will allow the VPN connection to be automatically established
when you connect from the remote control client.
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