Logmein.com – Quick Mention

Over the last couple of weeks I have myself rediscovering the benefits of using the remote desktop features of Logmein.com, a free remote desktop service hosted online

My parents recently purchased their first computer, an Acer Aspire laptop of some sort, running Windows Vista Home Basic, complete with basic Celeron CPU and 512MB of RAM. They purchased it from a well known UK supermarket chain, whose name consists of 4 letters, the first and last of which are both the same vowel (guess'?).

Anyhow, this laptop is not particularly good, but after upgrading the memory to 2GB it is just about serviceable for their needs.

As I mentioned previously, this is their first computer, so they are complete novices and as such require a great deal of assistance to get it up and running safely and securely, and also to sign up for an email address, and for Ebay/Paypal (something which my Father really wants, but do I really trust him?). Living over 20 miles away, and having my own growing family to deal with, while working full time and having no transport of my own at present, providing the support he needs is difficult, hence my revisit to Logmein.com.

Logmein allows me to log-in to my parents laptop across the internet, and take control of their machine as if I were sitting in front of it. I can control the mouse, type with the keyboard and browse the internet just as if I had the laptop on my own lap at the time. The most important thing to me in my scenario though, is that my parents laptop stays on the entire time, and they can see exactly what I am doing. As such I can talk to them on the telephone, explaining to them what I am doing on their computer and why, and allowing them to take control too.

Logmein.com, once signed-up for, allows the user to download and install a small program that allows you to connect to your PC in a remote desktop session, across the internet from anywhere in the world, securely and above all, free of charge.

There is only one significant hurdle for me though when it comes to the Logmein service, which is that I cannot currently use it on my laptop, which runs Ubuntu Linux to access other computers. This is a big shame, especially since there is a plug-in available for Firefox users that relinquishes the need to install a program in Windows, but it seems this plug-in does not apply to Linux based Firefox users, a first for me! Conversely however, it does run quite happily on Mac's, which is good news for some, just not for some others!

I mentioned earlier that Logmein is a free service. While this is true for home users, there are also paid-for services available for business users, but for most the free service is good enough.

If you have anything you would like to share on the subject of Logmein.com's services please leave them in the comments below!