Microsoft Mesh redux…
Two minutes! That’s how long it took me to correct a problem I had on my home PC this morning. And I wasn’t even at home when I fixed it. Let me explain…
It seems that now I have my fast cable internet installed, my Yahoo! Messenger at home refuses to give up its connection like it used to. What I mean by that is usually I have Messenger loaded at home and then I come to the office and then reopen it on my desktop. What this normally does is close down my Messenger at home (well, takes it offline anyway) and I then carry on using it at work until I get home again in the evening where I reverse the process. Sounds easy. And it’s been working fine like this for a few years now.
But this morning after I got to work and connected to Messenger it decided to go offline by itself after a few minutes telling me it was online on another computer! Well, not to be outdone, I got it back online on my work PC again and carried on. Yet again a few minutes later the same thing happened and so the tussle continued for an hour or so. Hmmm, what to do?
Then I remembered I have Mesh and Home Server, both of which allow remote access to your PC. That is they are both supposed to. I found out there’s a little clause in the Windows Home Server documentation that says it doesn’t support a remote desktop connection to a PC that’s running Vista Home of any flavor. And yes, of course my PC, likes millions of others, is running Vista Home Premium and so I can’t remote desktop to it. Still, that leaves the ever trusty Mesh which I’ve blogged and blogged about before. This little application never ceases to amaze me. I simply navigated to mesh.com, hit the ‘connect to my PC’ button and lo and behold I got a login prompt for my home PC right on my screen at work. Magic. One password and one click later and I had my desktop in front of me and I was controlling my home PC from the office, just as if I was sat in front of it. I quickly opened up my Yahoo! Messenger and closed it down and then logged off my home PC. I re-opened Messenger on my office desktop and there we go, sweetness and light had been restored. No more interruptions!
This is exactly what modern day computing should be about. Doing simple clever things. Just a few years ago I read all these pitches to buy remote-PC (or some such program) and all these applications cost like $20 a month. Mesh is FREE!!!
Well it finally seems like my home PC network setup is coming together. Now that I have fast internet installed, and after some small adjustments to everything, I am fairly happy with what I have. I still need to get backups properly organized via Home Server; I currently do partial backups via that and other backups via a backup program that runs every day for me. My T-Mobile home phone is still performing flawlessly and now that they have introduced Discounted International Calling there really is no need for anything else.
