Controlling a nice PC with a cheap-ass netbook - good solution?

[Frankenfurter]

Hey all,

I've been looking at freeing myself from my desk with a wireless keyboard and mouse, long story short I ended up browsing netbooks. Seems they're pretty cheap now so I'm considering using remote desktop on a netbook instead of the wireless input devices.

What I'd like to know is whether the connection will be noticeably slower than it would be with a wireless mouse/keyboard (though I guess this would only matter for gaming), what the fastest & farthest reaching connection method would be (ad-hoc wireless, bluetooth, etc.) and what my best bet for software (preferably free) would be. So... any ideas?

If anyone here's done this before also, I'd love to hear how it went.

Cheers,
Frankie

[herulach]

Any of the commonly available remote desktop protocols should be fine for office use even on reasonably low end hardware, just connected over your ordinary wifi.

[Frankenfurter]

I'd rather connect directly between the two devices if I can, there're too many devices for our poor old router to handle already without adding another one. >.<

Good to know it'll work though. Will it be OK for gaming or will I have noticeable input-lag?

[virtuo]

I'd rather connect directly between the two devices if I can, there're too many devices for our poor old router to handle already without adding another one. >.<

Good to know it'll work though. Will it be OK for gaming or will I have noticeable input-lag?

Remote Desktop is, as far as I'm aware, uncompressed. So even on a very quick and uncongested network, the refresh rate is going to be poor and there will be noticeable lag - depending on the game I'd say it wouldn't really work too well.

You could look in to other implementations of Remote Desktop other than the in-built Windows version - maybe some of those compress the video?

[Frankenfurter]

Ok. Thanks virtuo, I'll look into it.

[herulach]

Theres plenty of aftermarket vnc implementations that compress the data. Even standard VNC isn't awful for office software as it only transmits changed screen areas. For gaming I'd guess something like nvidia's streaming doodad will offer significantly better performance.

[Frankenfurter]

Thanks, herulach - I'll check a few out.

[rich835]

I use Microsoft's Remote Desktop at work quite a lot and I find it very fast indeed.
The thing with it is, that you're a remote client when connected, as in a dedicated session for your user account, so you're not screen-scraping like you do with VNC etc.
This is great if you want to do system stuff, web browsing, or office work.

Gaming I would say is another matter altogether. I can't imagine that Microsoft's remote desktop really would be suitable in that case.
I'm not sure that I would have confidence in any remote solution for gaming really, you're going to be riddled with problems like sound transmission not just graphics.

Maybe there's some hardware solution on the market that could help, like a KVM switch that can operate over a network?
That might be worth some research.

[realstock]

VNC would be the easiest solution to implement, gaming through any remote desktop application is going to be horrible and not worth considering.

With RDP if your connecting to a stand alone desktop, you will have to put a password on your PC to allow the RDP session to connect, which i found to be a pain for my home PC, although it will work. But it will look like its locked and when someone logs onto the PC locally, it will boot you off.

With VNC you can share the screen with the remote and local user. RDP won't do that.

[Dareos]

What router are you using and how many devices are connected? Modern routers shouldnt have any issues with a great number of devices (my shub currently has 24 devices or so running on it) unless theres peer to peer traffic running through it (cripples traffic flow).

I use team viewer, log me in, but i reckon you want something that connects within the same network rather than using an outside proxy so Remote Desktop would be my choice, definitely not for gaming though.

[watercooled]

Just a heads-up to avoid potential frustration. Don't waste your time trying to do gaming, or video, or anything remotely bandwidth or latency-intensive over remote desktop. It isn't magic - stuff like gaming/video would need a heck of a lot of bandwidth/processing power (trade-off) to approach acceptable latency/quality/refresh rate.

Remote desktop/VNC/etc are designed to allow fairly simple, static screens to be displayed remotely - which is why you'll often see software nagging you to disable backgrounds/aero/effects/transitions/etc as even they really add to the bandwidth and processing needed to transmit the images. It's also not a video stream, generally only updates will be sent in order to save bandwidth, with the network near-idling otherwise.

More recent technologies aimed at streaming games etc use hardware video encoders built into processors to achieve it, but at the end of the day it's still compressed with a lossless codec and will inherently have some extra input lag. Something like AMD's screen mirror may be more appropriate for the OP if they have an AMD APU.

AFAIK Nvidia's GameStream is locked to their Shield and limited to games. However it seems it's been reverse-engineered to allow streaming to other Android devices, with 'Limelight'.

Steam have also just released their own game streaming feature, but it's limited to streaming games in your Steam library.

[Frankenfurter]

Hey everyone, thanks for your responses.

I tried a couple of solutions on an old laptop but sadly none were really fast enough for the intended purpose. I'm going to go ahead and say that no, you can't control a nice pc from a cheap-ass notebook - at least over wifi and with reasonable performance. Still, at least I no longer have an excuse to buy a notebook I don't really need.