Remote access

It didn't take long for the iPad to find a home in business. Road warriors love being able to access their PC back in the office. The best way to sign into your office PC remotely is via a virtual private network (VPN) connection. Apple explains how to set up a VPN on an iOS device; note that you'll likely need some information from your organization's IT department to complete the process.

You can also use a service such as GoToMyPC or LogMeIn: the former gives away its iPad app and charges from $10 a month or $… Read more

Few people do all their work on a single computer. Fewer still don't occasionally need access to files on another PC, whether their own or someone else's. The free Gbridge program lets you access and synchronize files and folders on any Internet-connected PCs quickly and simply.

Gbridge uses Google Talk to create a VPN connection for the secure transfer of files between your own PCs and the machines of family, friends, and coworkers. The service requires a Gmail account, but if you'd rather not use your primary Gmail account, you can create one for free specifically for … Read more

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Friday, October 9, that the H1N1 virus was widespread in 37 states. Fortunately, vaccines are on their way, and seasonal flu shots are currently available (the map on the Flu.gov site helps you find a vaccination center near you).

The best way to avoid bringing the flu bug home with you from the office is to stay out of the office. If you have the flu, do yourself and your coworkers a favor: stay home and rest! Not sure if you have the flu? Check the CDC site for a list and description of the symptoms of both H1N1 and seasonal flu. You'll also find information on the CDC site for taking care of people with the flu, prevention for people at high risk, and travel updates.

One of the best ways to track the flu's spread is via Google Flu Trends, an interactive map that indicates the frequency of flu-related search terms in various countries.

Additional information on flu trends is available for the U.S. and several other countries. For the U.S., you can compare yearly flu trends and view data for each state.

Link to your office PC for free In many work situations, there's no substitute for being face to face. But every year it gets easier to get your office work done from outside the office. One way to do so is via Windows' Remote Desktop Connection component, which lets you link to a PC that's on an office network, but only if the machine's running XP Professional or Vista/Windows 7 Professional, Business, or Ultimate.

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Let me begin by stating that most tech-support staff know their stuff and exhibit the patience of Job when dealing with us dumb, short-tempered users. Let me add further that on some occasions in the past I have had a less-than-pleasant demeanor when seeking the assistance of help-desk helpers.

Even though support staffers have saved my bacon on several handfuls of occasions, I feel like I have lost untold hours of my life on tech-support lines in a futile effort to troubleshoot some PC problem or other.

My most recent exchange with tech support occurred after a mail-server upgrade went … Read more

I spent Wednesday afternoon getting to know Microsoft's new Office Live Workspace, a free service that lets you store Office files online for easy access and sharing.

Once I got used to what the service isn't--it isn't a way to actually work on the files in a browser--I came to appreciate how easy the service makes it to save Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on the Web, and open them in their original app on any PC with an Internet link.

The biggest downside is how difficult it is to get the service working on a Vista machine running Office 2007. I was uploading and downloading Office 2003 documents on my XP machine in just a few minutes, but I had to jump through a series of hoops to do the same in their Office 2007 equivalents on my newer Vista PC.

I decided to start from scratch by creating a new Windows Live account rather than using my existing Hotmail account. Signing up for the account was a breeze, though I opted out of most of the options the installer presented. For example, I had no interest in downloading Messenger, the Windows Live Toolbar (my browser's cluttered enough already), or anything having to do with OneCare, which single-handedly destroyed my home network when I tried out the beta last summer. Be sure to uncheck the option to make MSN your home page, and you may want to avoid sending Microsoft any more data than the company already helps itself to.

Once the Windows Live installation completed, it took just a few more clicks to get started with Office Live Workspace. You're prompted to give the generic workspace a name and description, which you can change later simply by mousing over the name in the left pane and choosing one of the options that appears.

Of course, there's not much you can do with the service until you get some files uploaded. You can add files from inside the workspace one at a time or in batches, though the batch approach uses an ActiveX control, and thus requires Internet Explorer 6 or higher. Since I normally use Firefox (and had used that browser to create the workspace), switching to IE just to upload a bunch of files at once would have been a major inconvenience. Still, I never intended to use this method to add files to the workspace. Instead, I downloaded the Office Live Add-in, which lets you upload files to and download them from the workspace directly inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

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We get so used to doing things a certain way, we sometimes miss new techniques that could save us time and trouble. My latest "d'oh!" moment was when I realized, after spending a couple of hours moving files from my office PC to an FTP server so I could sync them with my new laptop, that there's a better and faster way that doesn't cost a nickel: remote access.

A couple of years ago I edited a review of a half dozen remote-access services that link to a PC from any other Internet-connected machine. At … Read more

Nearly all broadband Internet accounts come with storage on the ISP's servers, but I'll wager not one in 10 broadband users ever store anything there. That's a shame, especially if you find yourself schlepping a USB thumbdrive or rewritable CD full of your personal files from computer to computer. There are dozens of free utilities out there that make transferring files between your local PC and an FTP or Web server as easy as dragging and dropping. The two I've been using are the open-source FileZilla FTP client, and 2Brightsparks' SyncBack, which is also available in … Read more