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In these fast times, leaving your work at the office is tough to do. You end up working at home, at the airport, at the in-laws', and even at the coffee shop. But no matter how well you prepare for these out-of-office travails, it's easy to forget an important file back at the cube farm. What if you could just connect to your office computer over the Internet?

You can, of course. Citrix's GoToMyPC remote-access service costs $20 a month and allows you to move files from and to a remote PC, and otherwise control that machine. Using WebEx Communications' MyWebExPC to access a remote system doesn't cost anything, but to make file transfers you'll need the $10-per-month MyWebExPC Pro version. (Look for reviews of these and other remote-access programs in next month's issue.) Fortunately for us tightwads, a treasure buried in Windows XP Professional offers many of the same remote-access features; all you have to do is set it up.

Windows XP's Remote Desktop allows you to configure one computer as a client (the computer where you are) and another as a host (the one where you aren't). The big caveat here is that the host system must be running Windows XP Professional--the Home Edition includes only the client part of Remote Desktop.

To enable your XP Pro system as a Remote Desktop Server (the host), right-click My Computer, choose Properties, select Remote, and in the 'Remote Desktop' section, check Allow users to connect remotely to this computer. To determine which of the system's users to permit to connect remotely, click Select Remote Users. As long as your user account is part of the system's Administrator group, you'll be able to log in using your regular Windows user name and password. Once you have verified that your account has access, click OK twice.

To set up an XP system as a Remote Desktop client, choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, Communications, Remote Desktop Connection. (For earlier Windows versions, download and install Microsoft's free Remote Desktop Connection utility.) Select the General tab (click Options if no General tab is visible). In the 'Computer' field, enter the remote PC's IP address (or its name, if it's on the local network); then type your user name and password into their respective fields (see FIGURE 1). To transfer files, click Local Resources and check Disk Drives under 'Local devices'. Click Connect to take control of the remote system. Select Help for explanations of Remote Desktop's many other features.

If you can't connect, make sure that you aren't being blocked by hardware or software firewalls. If the host PC uses a private IP address (the most common version is 192.168.xxx.xxx, where the x's vary from one address to the next), you must configure your firewall/router to forward incoming connections to it. For more information on these and other connection woes, consult Microsoft's Remote Desktop troubleshooting guide.

If your version of Windows doesn't support remote connections, or if you want to connect to or from a Macintosh or Linux system, try a free tool based on AT&T's Virtual Network Computing protocols. RealVNC was developed by former AT&T engineers, while UltraVNC gets high marks for its performance-boosting Windows driver. For more on RealVNC, read Scott Dunn's July 2004 Windows Tips column).