Use Your Computer From Anywhere: A Guide to Remote Controlling Your PC

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I have decided to post a link to this very helpful article.

http://lifehacker.com/5902654/use-your-home-computer-from-anywhere-a-comprehensive-guide-to-remote-controlling-your-pc

http://lifehacker.com/five-best-remote-desktop-tools-1508597379

You should keep a few things in mind when accessing your computer from the Internet. Firstly, every click you click and every text you type will have a slight and noticeable delay. Basically, with remote access, you send the keyboard typing and mouse movement to the remote computer and that computer sends back the up-to-date video of its screen measured in resolution and frame per second. The more resolution, the larger and sharper is the screen. The higher the frame rate, the smoother is the motion of any changes made on the screen. All remote access solutions use some sort of data compression to make the videos being stream back towards you smaller in file size per frame. Therefore, the smoothness in motion and the sharpness of the graphics of the remote computer's screen depend on the processing speed of both the remote computer and the local machine that compress and decompress this video stream. On top of that, there is also the encryption and decryption of the video stream as well. After all, this data that goes back and forth traverses the Internet so in theory anyone whose computers the data goes through can intercept the data. So you may not want these unauthorized people to see the screen of the remote computer and any keystrokes from you that may contain confidential information.

While all remote access technology uses some sort of compression to make the experience smoother, not all of them use encryption. Therefore, if you have confidential data being sent back and forth between your local machine and the remote machine, please make sure that there is encryption involved.

Moreover, just because there is encryption, it does not mean that the encryption is strong enough. Any unauthorized person who is skilled enough will eventually crack the encryption. If your remote access method uses encryption methods like DES, then it is not strong enough for ultra-confidential data. At a minimum, it should be AES 256bit.

If you do not know what sort of encryption your remote access technology uses, then you can use your own encryption method and have the remote access technology run inside your encryption. Therefore, you may actually have a case of double encryption. To do this, you can set up a VPN tunnel between your local computer and the remote computer. You can use the VPN solutions that are built into the operating system or use a third part solution.

A simple VPN using PPTP should be sufficient. Although not as secure as the others, PPTP is fast and is found in all major operating systems from Windows XP to Windows 8. Mac OSX also supports PPTP out-of-the-box. Setting up VPN using PPTP is also easy.

However, if you have confidential data going between the two machines, you should get at least L2TP or IPSec. These are also built into most major operating systems but you may want to have a dedicated box that does the encryption outside the computers. These boxes can also be your network routers. They are not expensive. Having a $200 router that is placed in the network of the remote computer should work fine. You don't need to have another of this router in the network of the local network.