Citrix Online GoToMyPC 4.0

Setup and interface of Citrix Online GoToMyPC 4.0

Setting up a new GoToMyPC account is easy. Simply go to the GoToMyPC site, type your e-mail address, choose a password, then download the 2MB of software needed to turn your machine into a host PC (sorry, only Windows-based PCs can be hosts). After the software installs, enter a name for the host PC, then create an access code (think password). On our DSL connection, we finished the setup process in less than five minutes.

Activating the host from another computer is no harder than logging on to a Web site. From a computer running any operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun, or Windows CE) and using a Java-enabled browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, or Mozilla), surf to the GoToMyPC site, log in with your username and password, then click a host computer to access. (Usually, only one PC is listed, but corporate users could have several choices.) Although there's a slight wait each time you access a new GoToMyPC host, as a small Java applet loads on the remote machine, you'll soon see the host's desktop as though you were sitting in front of that distant machine. When you log off, the Java app disappears, removing any trace of your remote session from the remote computer.

To avoid confusion with the remote's own desktop, the host's screen is contained within a window that can be resized, dragged to a better spot, or left as is. Anything you do within the host's frame, however, is the same as being there.

Drop-down menus at the top of the host's window frame connect to a few of GoToMyPC's utilities (see the Features section), disconnect from the host, open the Windows Task Manager on the host, or zoom in or out of the host view. You can even expand the host to full window on the remote machine.

Like all remote-control programs, GoToMyPC is only as fast as its slowest connection. If both you and your host PC have broadband connections, everything's pretty fast. But try to make GoToMyPC zip through host files with a dial-up remote client, and things bog down. During our informal testing on two broadband PCs, the lag time between clicking and seeing the response was between 3 and 9 seconds, depending on what we were doing. For instance, reading e-mail from the host involved minimal lag, but scrolling through a long Word document made us go numb from the 9-second wait.