Chris Wilson Posted October 2, 2009 Share Posted October 2, 2009 I use VNC on my laptop via a hard wired network cable when I am in bed and need to check something on the office PC upstairs (sounds Irish, but it's a bungalow). It works fine. However, I'd like a permanent PC console in the workshop, and maybe in another room. I am more than happy being able to operate the main PC from what is effectively a second screen and keyboard. Is VNC the best or only way to achieve this? What level PC is needed to run VNC? Could I, for example, have a very cheap and cheerful tiny PC running maybe Linux with just enough stuff loaded to run VNC, or would it need some powerful processing and a lot of memory? The other PC(s) do not need to have any other functionality other than for them to be effectively duplicates of the main one. Finally, will VNC work ok over one of those network via the ring main 240 volt sockets things, or would it need hard wiring? Ta! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thorin Posted October 2, 2009 Share Posted October 2, 2009 Doesn't have to be very powerful at all, the lowest spec PC you can buy should run it fine. I've not used the homeplug network devices but they work very well from all accounts. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustGav Posted October 2, 2009 Share Posted October 2, 2009 Yes VNC would just fine over those, hell I've used it over modems. You will suffer with a bit of lag, however depending on what you are doing you should be fine. If all you want is a VNC pc, I've got an old one here, which would HAPPILY run it for you...(and a spare set of homeplugs if you want them) Bear in mind, VNC will run on those pocket pc jobbies-fang-dangled-things Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrRalphMan Posted October 2, 2009 Share Posted October 2, 2009 I currently use UltraVNC to get to my home PC from work, over a SSH tunnel, works perfectly and will automatically adjust the screen pallet when bandwidth gets tight. Although I am assuming that others will do this. How secure do you want it, do you want to be able to get into your network from outside it? IE when out and about? Gav... How good are the home plug things? I want to get a pair to hook my new Blu-Ray played up to the network, but I'm assuming a set of 85Mbps ones would do? Might even get a third and take my download PC off wireless. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jevansio Posted October 2, 2009 Share Posted October 2, 2009 RDP is my preferred way of controlling other pcs at home & work, built into Windows XP Pro IIRC, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Wilson Posted October 2, 2009 Author Share Posted October 2, 2009 I currently use UltraVNC to get to my home PC from work, over a SSH tunnel, works perfectly and will automatically adjust the screen pallet when bandwidth gets tight. Although I am assuming that others will do this. How secure do you want it, do you want to be able to get into your network from outside it? IE when out and about? Gav... How good are the home plug things? I want to get a pair to hook my new Blu-Ray played up to the network, but I'm assuming a set of 85Mbps ones would do? Might even get a third and take my download PC off wireless. I am using Real VNC, not sure how it allocates bandwidth' I won't be using it for access other than from a hard wired, or over mains PC in another part of the house / garage. Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Wilson Posted October 2, 2009 Author Share Posted October 2, 2009 Yes VNC would just fine over those, hell I've used it over modems. You will suffer with a bit of lag, however depending on what you are doing you should be fine. If all you want is a VNC pc, I've got an old one here, which would HAPPILY run it for you...(and a spare set of homeplugs if you want them) Bear in mind, VNC will run on those pocket pc jobbies-fang-dangled-things Thanks Gav, very kind of you, but I have 2 or 3 old PC's here I guess I could use, glad I didn't listen to my pal who told me to bin `em, he thinks anything PC wise over a month old is obsolete Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustGav Posted October 2, 2009 Share Posted October 2, 2009 Gav... How good are the home plug things? I want to get a pair to hook my new Blu-Ray played up to the network, but I'm assuming a set of 85Mbps ones would do? Well, I got a set free when I picked up a BT vision box off freecycle , plugged them in, and gave them a whirl. Tried copying a 4GB file and while the speed wasn't blinding, it wasn't half bad. I'll dig them out and give them a speed run and post up results. (I have no need to use them as I've CAT5'd the house already to a gig switch ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thorin Posted October 3, 2009 Share Posted October 3, 2009 Gav... How good are the home plug things? I want to get a pair to hook my new Blu-Ray played up to the network, but I'm assuming a set of 85Mbps ones would do? I should imagine you'd want the HomePlug AV devices for that (200Mbps). Trading standards really should have words though as they are nowhere near 200Mb. They're 100Mb full-duplex (100Mbps send, 100Mbbs receive). Some real world speed figures though... Home Plug vs 54g Wifi test An obvious comparison when investigating Home Plug devices is to compare them against traditional wifi devices. Apart from the factors such as reliability and the important point as to whether the network simply works or not (a recent survey found that 25% of home wifi users have problems with connection reliability however the same survey found that for 99% of Home Plug users their network worked first time, straight out of the box) one question is how the performance compares. To try and answer this we decided to do a simple back-to-back speed test comparing 14Meg Home Plug, 85Meg Home Plug (called Home Plug Turbo), 200Meg Home Plug and 54Meg (11g) Wifi. The results were very interesting. For the purpose of the experiment we did a simple test involving transferring a 25MegaByte file between a server and a windows PC. In this way we would try to emulate a typical working network test. To be fair all round the mains used for the Home Plug devices was clean and the Home Plug adapters were plugged directly into ring main sockets (not extensions). The wifi devices were Senao Prism chipset parts next to each other on the same desk - the wifi signal was excellent. These were the results: PL14 - 14Meg Home Plug adapter: 7.5Mb/s PL85 - 85Meg Home Plug Turbo adapter: 25Mb/s PL200AV - 200Meg Home Plug adapter: 40Mb/s 54g Wifi - 14Mb/s Interesting yes?! So this shows that 54g wifi was a long way from 54Meg performance even with a perfect wifi signal! When we moved one of the radio devices into the next room the wifi speed went down by over 30%! It also shows that Home Plug turbo is at least as good as perfect 11g wifi and, in our test, was actually nearly twice as fast. It also shows that 14Meg Home Plug is really quite good and certainly up to the task of most home/SOHO tasks such as shared internet access and simple file sharing between PC's. In fact I would guess that 14Meg Home Plug is perfectly adequate for 90% of home users that simple want to distribute internet access and, for those users, I would say that Home Plug Turbo is not worth the extra cost. The new 200Meg (AV) units are blindingly fast and, in our own tests, we were of the opinion that the measured performance might have been distorted to some extent by the PC's involved i.e. the PC's couldn't shift the data fast enough to keep up with the adapters! Something for the speed freaks to consider but way outside the requirements for the average home or office setup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Multics Posted October 3, 2009 Share Posted October 3, 2009 If your PC has a graphics card with two outputs, you can clone output1 (office monitor) to output2 and use a Cat5 KVM extender that also handles USB (mouse and keyboard) and connect your 2nd monitor, mouse and keyboard on the other end. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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