pcAnywhere or VNC?

[LocutusX]

Which would be more appropriate for remote access (through a 10Mbit LAN) of a WinNT 4.0 Server, running on an underpower Pentium Pro with barely enough RAM to keep all of it's processes in memory? VNC is free, which is good, but it seems sluggish. Is Norton pcAnywhere faster?

 

[dirtboy]

I like VNC. Sure it's alot cheaper. What I like is, it doesn't have all the overhead of pcAnywhere. There are other programs out there like these, many being better than pcAnywhere.

 

[LocutusX]

How do they compare speedwise?

I have WinVNC running on the server with the screen rez @ 640x480x16. It's rather sluggish. What can you suggest that's faster?

 

[LocutusX]

^ bump

 

[Relayer]

Try Remote Administrator

 

[Blayze]

I would go with VNC. Its nice and free too.

 

[JoLLyRoGer]

Cool find relayer. I'm gonna DL this and try it at home..

 

[mp3turbo]

hello,

as always, I'm the last - but I can confirm Relayer's thoughts. I've been using RAdmin from initial versions and it's pretty good and hella-fast (I know what I'm talking about, about year ago we had 48kBit line for internet, I was able to get about _READ_CAREFULLY_ 400 BYTES/SECOND throughput, no other program was able to function at that "speed" and hey, I've tried about 25 of them!! Remote Admin? Would not call it speed, I got one-two screen updates in five-seven seconds, but it WORKED!!!) Includes some nice features, NT domain access rights support, IP restriction (very good security feature, not so common and it's perfect; the only thing I'm little bit missing is MAC access control, it could be done in the same manner/time), customizable port number (wanna 80? You have it, with PC Anywhere you have to configure firewalls/routers etc which is impossible sometimes - tell your boss what you really need that for), optional remote-session user confirmation ("Do you want to allow remote session" question or something like that, in fact this was the reason why we've chosen this product - noone can tell me that I was looking over his shoulder), full control/view only (delegate adminstrative support to greenhorns - they will instruct user what to do, but they can't do that themselves), resizable screens (upto full screen, so many times I forgot that I'm working on remote machine), hideable icon in systray (hey, what's that icon in my tray? what is it good for, blablabla), stable as a rock, pretty good licencing policy (ehm, I mean price), connection statistics, logging, file transfer (very fast, too), remote shutdown without logging, did I mention telnet ? ...

what I'm talking about, do to beforementioned site and download trial version.

bye, mp3turbo.

 

[mp3turbo]

hello,

I forgot to mention, that my second pick would be NetOp Remote Control (www.danware.com or even better www.netop.com), more feature-rich than RAdmin, but also more expensive. This is modem/ISDN-guru...

bye, mp3turbo.

 

[tigerwannabe]

at my place of work, we use both pcAnywhere and VNC. i think pcAnywhere is
a bit faster. but as was said, VNC is free. on your setup, i'd go with the smaller footprint of VNC.

 

[LocutusX]

Interesting. Thanks for the suggestions.

I will try Remote Administrator as soon as I get home.

 

[vash]

PCAnywhere is a little bit faster than VNC, but VNC's price is great.

VNC's memory footprint isn't bad (especially on a server), but the CPU usage is way too high! Try hosting a CS server, VNC into the box and you'll be lagging all the clients immediately. PCAnywhere won't do this, so that's why I prefer it more on my server that hosts game machines.

Remote Admin is 10x faster than VNC and its quite useful as well. Also, Timbuktu works good too and feels faster than PCA (ihmo). VNC will probably suit your needs, but be wary of security -- I've seen plenty of VNC password hacks out there.

vash

 

[CTho9305]

VNC was slow on my p200mmx server, until I changed the encoding from hextile to raw. raw = no compression. Basically, the CPU was slow relative to the network (10mbps) so it took longer to compress the data than send the uncompressed data. its fast enough now

 

[LocutusX]

Interesting. I'll try changing it to RAW and see if that helps any.

 

[dirtboy]

RAW did drop the cpu utilization on the server quite a bit. Great tip!

 

[d33pt]

the reason why vnc seems so slow is because the client doesn't cache bitmaps on the clientside.. pcaw does so it seems faster..

 

[CTho9305]

yeah, if you read VNC's site it does say the client doesn't cache. I dont remember if they're planning on fixing that. BUT, if you "show window contents while dragging" it figures out what is going on and just moves the rectangle area, which is fast.