Jonathan Malek

I desperately didn’t want to pay the $199 for Timbuktu, but I finally gave in.  The quest was simple: find a reliable, fast way to remote into my MacBook laptop running Leopard from my desktop running Windows 2008, over a gigabit LAN.  The laptop sits next to me–I just want to use one keyboard.  The simplest features will do: I’m not looking for clipboard access across sessions, or file copying, or anything other than pure speed.  One keyboard, one mouse, 54" of screen real-estate, two OS’s and 12G of RAM between them.  Should be heaven, right?  It isn’t.

VNC is the first tool that pops up when starting on this quest.  As I’ve written before, VNC is a dog: it might feel great for people who are used to 56k modems, but I have watched movies from my Dell M90 across RDP on my desktop.  I want fast.

How do I define fast?  Well, I don’t need to watch movies, but when I run my mouse across the dock bar the icons should just…move.  No flickering, no stuttering.  Timbuktu manages to pull that off.

So I tried the canon of remote services: LogMeIn, GoToMyPC, and a handful of others.  LogMeIn, while free, took roughly 7 seconds to redraw my 17" laptop screen in a browser window.  GoToMyPC was the best after that, but still horridly chunky.

I then found Symantec’s PCAnywhere works with OS X.  The latest version (12.1) was priced just a little less than the Timbuktu solution.  I found a free trial of 12.0, downloaded, and failed on install in Win2k8.  I checked the usual suspects (Admin privileges, directory access), without success.

I found Bomgar (www.bomgar.com), but I didn’t have the heart in me to try a product that "starts at $1,988".  I’d rather just turn to my left and type on the MacBook keyboard…

It was my hope after reading some of the hurlyburly around RDP that I might find an alternative to Timbuktu, but nothing showed significant promise, not yet at least.  For now, Timbuktu will have to do, even though it hurts to pay for something I’ve used for free for years!

After reading this post, I had to check my Mozy install on my desktop–sure  enough, it reported that it hadn’t run successfully in 5 days, and the error message was a "required update".  No other clues would have alerted me to failed backups (it doesn’t show any kind of visual indicator until 7 days have gone by).  I would have been extremely upset to discover that in a recovery effort. 

So, I downloaded and installed (it requires a reboot–seriously?  Aren’t we past that?), and now my hourly backup option is gone; it is at most 12 times a day, and on low CPU impact.  Not happy with Mozy.  I decided to look back at Carbonite–my first impressions two years ago (I backed up 30G in about a week) was that it was clunky, but it sounds like it has gotten better.  I participated in the Beta back in early 2006, but my beta account is no longer active (schucks!)

The install was pretty painless on Vista x64, which is great.  I now have to wait for quite some time before all my content is backed up.  For the time being, I’m still running Mozy, but the whole point of automated backups is to not have to worry–and I worry about Mozy.

I’ve been on a quest to find software that would make my MacBook even remotely usable from a PC.  Using VNC on my gigabit LAN can be compared with using RDP over a 1200 baud modem.  I’ve tried every conceivable configuration without getting any faster than "agonizingly-torpid".

I finally stumbled across Timbuktu.  It’s not free, and I think I vaguely remember this company from a decade ago for Windows/Unix remote access.  I signed up for the 14-day trial, and after a couple of weeks of dithering, finally installed.  It’s not perfect (it’s got an awfully aged UI), but it is definitely the best I’ve used so far in terms of responsiveness–running my mouse across the icon bar at the bottom is relatively smooth.  For the first time, I’ve considered my MacBook usable from my desktop.

But there’s a problem–it’s priced at $199!  I am having a VERY hard time seeing how I’d be willing to pay $199 for something that’s out of the box on Windows.  You have to buy a "two-pack" multi-platform license, and there’s just no way I could justify that.  Does anyone know of alternatives?  And before anyone suggests another flavor of VNC, I’ve tried them all.