VNC or Virtual Network Computing has been around for a while now. Most people don’t know much about VNC or know very little about VNCs. I happen to use VNCs for my server in the basement, which doesn’t have a monitor, mouse, or keyboard. Being able to VNC is very nice since I can connect to it and do basically I want to do. I can be up in my room and tell my downstairs computer to run AVG or any other program. Sometimes people will install VNCs on their vacation computer and then they connect to it remotely. Some people even use another computer as a security camera, and then they connect to it and look at the security camera history. VNC can be used for a lot of different things. I even helped my friend delete a virus on her computer. She lives in New York and I decided to connect to her computer remotely and delete the virus, which I did. I was lucky enough to be behind my own firewall while her computer was wide open to the Internet. You must protect yourself on the Internet. If that means using a firewall, then use a firewall. Some firewalls I use are Comodo and ZoneAlarm. They are both very good and sometime can be very annoying to the point where you want to scream or even rip your head off. But that is what makes them great. Most people don’t really know how to use a firewall sadly.

Some VNC clients I personally like: TightVNC is great and is very easy to set up. In fact it’s the main VNC client I use on my computer in my basement. This client is so easy to configure all you have to do is download it and put in a password and you are done with the install. You must make sure that whatever computer you are going to connect to that you keep the VNC server running on it all the time, otherwise your connection will time out. Be sure to open the ports on your firewall so you can access the computer you want to control remotely. UltraVNC is the exact same way and it’s pretty easy to use. One thing that is real nice about VNC clients is the fact that you can, for instance, use Ultra VNC to connect to TightVNC — since they all use Internet addresses, you don’t need to use different clients. That is what I really love about VNCs. There is also TeamViewer, which I have used and I can tell you that it stinks. It’s horrible and it drops connections like crazy. I recommend you stick with TightVNC or UltraVNC since they both work well. TeamViewer also doesn’t display the screen right at all and makes the color displayed on the screen look really bad. If I’m not mistaken I think it displays in eight bit color which is really bad. VNCs are great for every computer and for anyone who wants to help someone else.

When you connect to someone’s computer remotely, make sure you tell them to allow access to the VNC server. Another important tip would be to tell the person to save all confidential work before they let you connect remotely. You don’t want to accidentally close out of something really important only to find that it wasn’t saved! You may also want to tell them to go do something else while you are fixing their computer. It is important for them not to be working on something while you are trying to fix something for them; it will mess you up. This last tip is pretty basic: make sure you get the right IP address from the person. I know someone may think that this sounds stupid, but you wouldn’t believe how many people I hear say “you want the 192.168.1.1 address?” “No, I want the external IP, not the one assigned by the router.” If you do not have the right address, you won’t be able to help the person at all. So if the person is a complete newbie, just be patient and talk them though it and tell them what to do before you connect. Most of the people I help are complete newbies and they are completely clueless as to what to do. I have learned over time to just be patient and let them figure out what they need to do in order to connect, don’t rush them!