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supermoto1962

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 5, 2009
28
0
Looking to find out how i can connect to my parents MacBook Pro, across the internet, to carry out maintenance and installations of new software. Any idea's or pointers?
 
Looking to find out how i can connect to my parents MacBook Pro, across the internet, to carry out maintenance and installations of new software. Any idea's or pointers?
For providing remote support, I use TeamViewer, which works with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Ubuntu, iPhone, iPad, etc. It's very secure and quite simple to set up and use.... and it's free for personal use.
 
I use iChat and either a Jabber (Google Talk, etc...) or AIM (MobileMe) account to do this. I have iChat set to login when they log onto their machine, same goes for on mine.

With iChat it means they can message me, or start an audio/video conference with me. I can then switch to remote accessing their machine whilst still being able to talk to them.

It's worked well for me with my parents and other family members.
 
I use logmein.. it's nice because you can log into any of your computers that you set it up on from any other computer. Basically same functionality as Teamviewer but in a web browser. Once you set it up on the host computer, the machine just has to be turned on and running the logmein application and you can log in at any time.

I've used both team viewer and logmein and have found logmein to be more convenient mostly because I can access multiple computers from the same account and don't have to put in an access number and such when trying to log in. (team viewer assigns a unique number to each computer which is then used whenever one needs to log into that specific computer, at least thats how it worked a couple years ago after I stopped using it)

www.logmein.com
 
I use iChat and either a Jabber (Google Talk, etc...) or AIM (MobileMe) account to do this. I have iChat set to login when they log onto their machine, same goes for on mine.

With iChat it means they can message me, or start an audio/video conference with me. I can then switch to remote accessing their machine whilst still being able to talk to them.

It's worked well for me with my parents and other family members.

So do I just need iChat? Just log in and the person on another Mac logs into iChat and I can chane/fix things on theirs?
 
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So do I just need iChat? Just log in and the person on another Mac logs into iChat and I can chane/fix things on theirs?

Yes, you both log into iChat (iChat can be set to login automatically when you log onto the computer), you must also have each other in your contact list. Then you right click on the user and select "Ask to share otherusers screen". On the other persons computer it pops up a box asking them to accept the screen sharing. Same goes for if you want to do a text, audio or audio/video chat.

In this respect it's not fully automatic, though if you really need it to be, in the iChat preferences on the machine you want to automatically control, you go to Alerts, select Invitation to Share My Screen. Then from the run an AppleScript script drop down choose Auto Accept.applescript.

Note that when screen sharing it should start an audio chat at the same time.
 
Yes, you both log into iChat (iChat can be set to login automatically when you log onto the computer), you must also have each other in your contact list. Then you right click on the user and select "Ask to share otherusers screen". On the other persons computer it pops up a box asking them to accept the screen sharing. Same goes for if you want to do a text, audio or audio/video chat.

In this respect it's not fully automatic, though if you really need it to be, in the iChat preferences on the machine you want to automatically control, you go to Alerts, select Invitation to Share My Screen. Then from the run an AppleScript script drop down choose Auto Accept.applescript.

Note that when screen sharing it should start an audio chat at the same time.

sorry for the dumb questions.
Now do I have to use am AIM name to use this?
 
sorry for the dumb questions.
Now do I have to use am AIM name to use this?

No it works fine with Jabber as well (Bonjour too, though thats only local), note that for Jabber you could use GoogleTalk (which uses Jabber) or any of the other free servers that are available to join, of which there are many.

Facebook should also work though unlike the other Jabber servers it would require that both users are using Facebook.

EDIT: Though as I mentioned before both users must be on the same network, so one using AIM and another using Jabber won't work. However with Jabber you do not need to be using the same server (well with some this is the case, namely Facebook), for example one user could have a GoogleTalk account, the other could have an @jabber.org account and it would work fine.
 
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I have found that Teamviewer (free) and Logmein (free when done from computer to computer, cost when done from a tablet or phone) work the best.
 
Logmein is really good, i've used it many times and its never failed!
 
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