Hey Guys, Here’s just a nugget of knowledge from the useless knowledge gold mine. As a windows user I crave things i try going wrong but for once it worked, It involves a windows laptop and a mac mini.

The principle of VNC (Virtual Network Computing for anyone whose interested) is that you can control another computer from your current computer over the local network and in fact the Internet. However, it isn’t for the faint of heart…

To start you need a VNC server on the machine you want to control and a VNC viewer on the computer you want to control FROM. If you’re just going from Windows-to-Windows I recommend you use Tight VNC (http://www.tightvnc.org) and download the Tight VNC setup from the download page, this includes the server and the viewer so a computer with this installed can act as a viewer and server. For Mac OS X the viewer is built right into the OS and so is the server, but it only seems to work with other macs, so if you want to VNC with a windows machine you will need to download a third party VNC server, I use Vine Server (http://sourceforge.net/projects/osxvnc/) formerly OSXvnc which is free.

You will need to get the IP (Internet Protocol) Address of the computer you want to connect to and type it into the VNC server on the client machine, but make sure the server on the other machine (the one you want to connect to) is running, usually signified by an icon in the taskbar on windows or the dock icon with a running arrow on Mac OS X.

Now it’s time to connect. So type in the the IP address (if on a local network the IP address is likely to be something like 192.168.1.xxx, the x’s being numbers) now connect. On Mac, the vnc viewer is a little hidden away. To connect via VNC you need to make sure that the finder id the app with focus, then goto the Go menu and select to server (the shortcut for this is command - k). A box will then appear, you need to type “vnc:\\” then the IP address. This will start the screen sharing app and connect to the VNC serer on the other computer.

Simple huh? you effectively have control of any other computer on your home network with VNC installed. But why stop there. Why not try doing it over the Internet. See my next blog post for more information.