Well, I’ve been using realvnc (www.realvnc.com), and I think it’s neat. Now granted, I’ve only used it on my local network, which is a workgroup and not a domain; but I like it much more than the Remote Desktop that comes with Windows XP.

The reason I like it better than Remote Desktop is because I can share a desktop among more than one computer. I run Windows XP Pro SP2, and I’ve found that when I connect to another computer with Remote Desktop, my local computer logs off.

What I want is to share a program with multiple computers. You know, I’m running an app and I want three or four friends to also see that app. In fact I want more than that … I want those three or four friends to be able to take control of my app – click a checkbox or click a button. I can do this with realvnc.

We have used gotomeeting (www.gotomeeting.com) for this. Gotomeeting is a great program and works fine over the Internet. And I haven’t tried realvnc over the Internet. I think the cost of gotomeeting is reasonable. It’s about $50/month, but realvnc has a free version.

There are for-pay versions of realvnc. On their website you can compare features. The personal edition does encryption and file transfer along with some other features that I don’t understand like “one-port HTTP & VNC” and “Desktop Scaling.” The cost is reasonable (about $30 for each server site). I have not tried running the viewer on a site that does not have the server.

Gotomeeting has a messaging capability that realvnc lacks (or I haven’t found it.) This is not a big loss for me. We like to use Skype (www.skype.com) for voice communication anyway. BTW, Skype works really well over broadband and over the free wireless I can pick up in various coffee shops, but it worked terribly with PeoplePC. I had dialup PeoplePC for a while and was not impressed with its performance and got somewhat irritated with its silly user interface.

When I first started using realvnc, I was not able to share a desktop with several computers. When another viewer connected to my VNC server, the computer with the previous view lost its connection. Easily fixed, though, you got to configure the VNC viewer to have a shared connection. To do this open the viewer and click on Options before you connect to the VNC server. Then, under the Misc tab, choose “Shared connection…”

Here’s a screenshot of one of my computers running the viewer and connection to another of my computers running the server.

Now admittedly I have not tried this over the Internet yet. I don’t know what kind of problems firewalls and NAT routers will give me, but so far I really like realvnc.

Anyone else using it?