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Testing LogMeIn's new service
I've been trying out the beta version of LogMein's updated remote control service, which is due to go live at the end of this month. It adds a number of new features that make life easier when accessing a computer remotely.
LogMeIn's service is useful if you need to access your computer remotely, whether to fetch some documents you need or to use an application that you wouldn't otherwise have access to.
I've found the service extremely useful when working from home. Our company email system uses Lotus Notes, and web-based access to this is rather primitive and unsatisfactory. Rather than install Notes on my home PC, it's easier to remotely view the screen of my office computer instead.
The new LogMeIn version makes the controls clear and easier to find than before. You can go into a remote control session or open the file transfer window at any time by clicking a single button. When in a remote control session, a pop-up control panel lets you flick between the browser view and full screen mode, and select various other options.
New features include support for drag and drop file transfer. If I've written an article at home, this lets me copy the document file to my office PC as easily as you would move a document between folders on the same computer.
However, LogMeIn also seems to have improved the performance of the remote control viewer itself. A year or two back, most remote control tools suffered to a greater or lesser degree from network latency, meaning that when you moved the mouse, the pointer on the remote screen took a fraction of a second to follow.
Using the new LogMeIn, I didn't experience any of this. When in full-screen mode, I found it easy to believe that the Windows desktop I was using belonged to my home PC in front of me, and not the remote office system. However, there is a floating status message and a toolbar at the top of the screen that gives the game away.
My only gripe is that I couldn't get LogMeIn to bring sound from the remote computer to my home PC, but this is likely to be an issue that is sorted out before the updated service goes live at the end of September.
Nivio to provide virtual desktops via web
You can get email in a web browser, and even edit documents in a browser using web-based applications such as Google Docs, so why not go the whole hog and have your entire Windows desktop accessed via a browser?
One company that will soon offer users this option is Nivio. Its service lets users subscribe to access a Windows XP desktop through a browser for £7.99 per month. The desktop is hosted by Nivio, and accessed through any browser supporting Java or ActiveX.
Anyone who has used a service such as GoToMyPC or LogMeIn to view their PC desktop remotely will be familiar with the concept, but in this case the system you access isn't a real physical PC, but a virtual one living in a datacentre.
The drawback of this approach is that you can't install your own applications. Nivio provides a selection of free applications such as those from the OpenOffice.org suite, plus others such as Microsoft Office 2003 applications, which cost extra. Once you subscribe to an application, its shortcut appears on your desktop and the app itself is streamed in when you access it.
As you can see from the screenshot, a Nivio hosted desktop is nothing really exceptional to look at – it looks pretty much the same as any other Windows XP desktop, as it should.
Nivio believes that this service could save smaller companies on the cost of owning and managing their own PCs. Customers could instead use terminals or outmoded PCs to access a Windows XP desktop remotely. However, you would have to be pretty confident about the reliability of your internet connection to follow this route.
Another drawback is the difficulty of getting data files on and off your virtual desktop. Nivio provides an application to let you upload and download files, but for this you need….a Windows PC.
When floors and laptops collide
Most well-managed companies employ proper backup procedures to ensure that user data is not lost if a laptop should hit the deck. But there can be slips between cup and lip, and indeed mobile users can all too easily trip over a power lead and bring a laptop crashing to earth - typically when they last logged on to the office network a fortnight ago. In most cases any lost data will be a minor inconvenience, but in others it will be a significant hit to the business.
Fortunately in such situations there are a host of specialist firms who will endeavour to recover data from a dead laptop or damaged hard-drive. Most are capable of taking the disk unit to pieces in a cleanroom and reading the platter surface directly, if necessary. This kind of expertise doesn’t come cheap - prices range from a few hundred pounds up to about £4,000 for a single drive, depending on how much work is needed and how quickly you want results. But when vital data is in bits you’ve become a beggar with not too many options.
Last month we gave a damaged laptop hard-disk to two such specialists, to see what data they could retrieve. The disk had suffered a head-crash and bearing failure, the result of a genuine accident rather than a piece of injudicious drop-testing in our Labs.
The disk is still with the second firm, so a full review of the results would be premature - a detailed account will appear later this month. However, we have already learned some useful facts.
First, it’s worth bearing in mind that any encounter with a data recovery firm is going to cost you. Few specialists put their prices on their web sites, but many make a “no data, no fee” promise. However, in reality it is extremely unlikely that every single file out of the tens of thousands on a typical disk (including system files) will be ruined, so it’s worth clarifying what “no data” means to you if you’re dealing with such a firm.
The second factor worth considering is that the best chance of a full recovery comes from keeping a damaged disk as pristine as possible. Last-gasp attempts to grab files from a faltering disk, or the use of software repair utilities, can make matters worse if the physical damage to the drive is severe.
The snag is, it will often be unclear exactly how severe the physical damage is until you attempt to repair the drive...
All in all, prevention is probably better than the cure, however sophisticated the recovery process. Investing in a batch of memory sticks for mobile users might be the best long-term bet.
Wyse move for resellers
The tests of Wyse Streaming Manager are going well, but things are rarely as easy as they seem at first glance. A sales engineer for Wyse walked me through the process of publishing an application so that it could be streamed to the thin client from the server. He made it look simple.
Later, I tried to follow his steps, taking a system snapshot of the test workstation, installing the application (actually the OpenOffice.org suite), then taking a second snapshot, before building an image from the differences between the two.
This captures the files and settings that the install program has introduced – the essence of the application, in other words.
But after making an application AppSet of this, then adding it to the server and trying to access it from the Wyse terminal, I found that nothing happened.
Hmmm. It seems that there is a certain amount of tweaking that needs to be done once the Publisher has sorted the application wheat from the chaff of all the other files on the system, and it seems that this can be highly specific to the particular application.
Looks like resellers or system integrators with a sound knowledge of the Windows Registry will find themselves in demand if sales of Wyse Streaming Manager pick up....
