Home Forums ultrabook for logmein/AC

My wife had an older 15" dell laptop at home. This is the same one in all the exam rooms, which is nice in a way. But we bought them all over 5 years ago.

She'd like to be able to work various places around the house to breakup the monotony of charts! She can do it today, but I think it'd be easier with something a lot lighter. All she ever does on the machine is log into work via logmein and run AC. Plus surf the web locally a bit.

I was looking at the newer dell XPS 13, just because we have all dells. But also at the Asus Zenbook UX31a but that got some really bad reliability reviews. I'm looking at 13" because I'm unsure if 11" will just be too small for the screen.

She logmein's mostly to the work laptops which are 1280x800 but sometimes into her desktop which is 1680x1050. Since her current laptop is 1280x800 that works out nicely when logged into the same laptop. It's 1:1 with her screen. With some new ultrabooks being 1920x1080 I'm wondering if she'll end up with just a little rectangle in the center surrounded by black on logmein. That is, can she use the extra resolution or is it in fact a detriment? Maybe should consider 11"?

I'm the IT guy for her office but very much an amateur. Most of our hardware (besides the main machine which we did upgrade) are now 5 years old I haven't stayed on top of latest advances.

You can adjust the resolution on LMI, go to the options or little screen window and you can make it more to your liking. That said, a smaller screen is a smaller screen. Would be nice if you could try before you buy.

Well have you considered using Remote Desktop? It will adjust to the resolution of your screen. Lots of people prefer remote desktop over LMI.

True, but I can't seem to increase the resolution above the maximum resolution of the machine you are logged into. For example the laptop in the office maxes out at 1280x800. If I log in from my desktop (2560x1440) the entire laptop's screen is only a small rectangle in the middle of my screen. I can change the laptop down to a lower resolution, but I can't change it up. Even "match resolution" results in only the small rectangle. This makes sense, the video card on the laptop can only put out a certain resolution. I could probably crank my local machine's resolution down to match the laptop, thus expanding the little rectangle to fill the screen, but then it would look all magnified, it would not be high resolution.

Yes it would be a nice to try first. I did briefly have an 11" macbook air. I think it worked okay for her, although I'd probably stick to windows. Yeah I wonder about 11" vs. 13" but then also about the various resolutions. What we have works perfectly because the remote laptop is identical to the office laptop. But it's a tank.

She spends serious hours on charts at home, needs to be a pretty good setup.

Thanks for mentioning it, I have never looked into it. I assume it requires more server or networking infrastructure than we have. We have Win7 Pro main machine and XP laptops right now. And very normal residential type router.

The main advantage of RDP over LMI is what? I've used RDP and LMI and VNC in my own work and considered them all pretty similar, they all present the remote screen. Are you saying RDP lets you set your screen resolution independently of the host machine's resolution? Like in my example above, a 1280x800 laptop could drive a 2560x1440 screen? Seems like black magic.

That's all you need. Windows 7 Pro and a basic residential router. Just need to open port 3389 for Remote Desktop or use a higher port for more security.


That's exactly what it does. I have no monitors hooked up to my server yet I use it as 5760x1080 through RDP. The desktop adjusts to the resolution of your computer. LMI is also capable of changing the resolution but it doesn't work as well as RDP. Also a lot of the pro features of LMI are standard on RDP. VNC/LMI are "dumb" protocols in the sense they just update the screen. RDP is an "aware" protcol which knows only to update certain regions that are being used. It's more efficient than LMI.

All I can say is that RDP is a lot better. I also use Team Viewer from home as a backup. Team Viewer somehow connects faster. But RDP has been my choice for Remote connectivity for years.

Sounds intriguing if it both "feels faster" and solves the resolution issue. But do we need VPN for this? Because you say "open port 3389" which is fine, I can do that. But how is it I connect to one of my machines? The router just has one static IP facing outwards -- but somehow I need to remote into specific machines. This is what LMI does, gives you an external URL to go to and see a list of your machines, isn't that solving the NAT problem? We have 10 PCs in the office and 3 providers who log in remotely with LMI.

Well if you had something like SBS 2011 Essentials or Standard, you get a nice little web portal called Remote Web Access which basically gives you a similar layout to LogMeIn where you can click which computer you want to remote into. Along with other things like files/emails. This comes out of the box with Essentials and Standard which is one of the many reasons you see SBS recommended so highly.

However, if you have a bunch of Windows 7 Pro's, you can still do it. Like you said you have one external IP but you also have 60,000 ports available on that IP. Most routers have the option of a public port (the one the Internet sees) and the private port (the one on your network/LAN). The private port will stay the same at 3389. You just change the external port e.g.

Dr. A has port 50,000 (Computer A=192.168.2.10)
Dr. B has port 50,001 (Computer B=192.168.2.11)
Dr. C has port 50,002 (Computer C=192.168.2.12)
etc.

It's a common security practice to avoid using standard ports such as 3389.

If you need some one-on-one assistance with the setup, just send me a PM.