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- Apr 17, 2018
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I'm vacationing in Ireland for three weeks in June. I was thinking about buying a netbook or some such to be able to connect to and work thru my home computer while I'm away. Any recommendations on hardware & software? My home computer is a PC running Windows 8.
Windows Remote Desktop, free from Microsoft, should be all you need. It will be slow, maybe about a fifth the speed of working directly at the machine, much worse for anything video intensive like gaming or video editing.
I suggest you get the laptop before you leave home, so you can make sure the connection works and troubleshoot any issues.
You'll need to set up the desktop machine to accept your remote login, your router to allow remote desktop requests to come in from the Internet, and your laptop to make that remote request.
I recommend a laptop rather than netbook if you can spare the price, size and weight (which isn't much for basic laptops these days). A laptop is a lot more powerful so you can do some of your work locally in Ireland, rather than having to run everything through the home machine.
If you don't have cloud storage account, it might be nice to get one before you go so you can park some useful files and work in progress in the cloud, and access them from Ireland.
Do a web search on something like "how to set up Remote Desktop for Windows 8" and you should get plenty of good tips.