pcANYWHERE32 8.0

Symantec's pcANYWHERE32 8.0 is a grand example of growing old gracefully. pcANYWHERE has virtually owned the remote control market for a decade, and this latest version remains state of the art. With pcANYWHERE, you can connect to your office PC from a remote site, remotely control your PC via a modem or the Internet, and quickly transfer and synchronize files between computers.

I have used pcANYWHERE since the old days, when DOS was king and Windows was still a dream. I hadn't used it for several years, though, and I was interested to see how well Symantec translated text-mode pcANYWHERE to the brave new GUI world.

I installed pcANYWHERE32 first on a Windows NT Server and then on my trusty IBM ThinkPad 560 running Windows 95. I connected this notebook to my network and I installed pcANYWHERE32 over the network from the server’s CD-ROM drive.

When I started my server, pcANYWHERE32 asked me for settings on modem, network, and direct cable connections. I kept the defaults. However, on my notebook I had to choose the correct PC Card modem, because I had used several on this machine.

Then came the decisive moment: connecting host to remote. During my last installation of pcANYWHERE, I had to make several trips between my office and that of the client I was trying to connect to, and I was worried that this installation would be another ordeal. I selected the network mode, because I had installed the software from the server, so I knew the host and remote could see each other.

After starting the host mode on my server, I switched my ThinkPad to the remote mode and looked for a host. After an instant, the name of my host machine appeared on the screen. I clicked the name and was connected. I then took a small gamble and started Dial-Up Networking on the host to connect to my Internet Service Provider (ISP). I thought connecting to my ISP might trip up pcANYWHERE32, because using the host for any communicating beyond the pcANYWHERE connection caused trouble in the past. I had no problem this time. I quickly connected to the Internet and brought up my browser.

I then decided to test pcANYWHERE32's reaction to different screen resolutions. My host was running at 1152 x 862-pixel resolution; my ThinkPad was limited to 800 x 600, but pcANYWHERE didn’t even blink. The software initially put me in aperture mode so that I had to use scroll bars on the remote machine to scroll and pan around the larger host desktop. Screen 1 shows the scrolled version of the host screen on my ThinkPad.

If the big picture is more important than a pixel-for-pixel view, you can choose scaling mode, which displays the entire host desktop in the remote’s full screen. As Screen 2 shows, this resolution is not legible enough for close work, but for some uses, not having to scroll and pan to move around the host desktop is handy.

Speed
My next concern was speed. In the old days, I used an 80 x 25 character text screen so pcANYWHERE didn't need to send much data over the connection. Even then, the screen was slow to respond so I was concerned that with all the data now displayed on high-resolution GUIs, pcANYWHERE32 would crawl. I need not have worried: Modems are several times faster and pcANYWHERE32 takes advantage of today’s high-performance processors to strip unneeded information out and send only what is necessary to keep the remote updated.

Over the network, the synchronization was excellent. It was eerie to hit the scroll bar on one machine and see the other machine respond. I thought the modem connections would be slow, but they were not as bad as I had expected. Screens took a second or two to change, but I found it easy to keep in step with the server on my remote. The software uses several methods to keep in sync. It takes advantage of today’s faster modems and it uses processor power to do smart compression of the data stream. The product can turn off wallpaper and screen savers on the host, which create a lot of traffic on the pcANYWHERE32 connection.

File transfers can take place in the background of a remote session. The software offers a SpeedSend option for transferring only the parts of a file that have changed. This feature is another example of pcANYWHERE32’s ability to use processing power to cut communications needs. Older systems didn't have enough horsepower to optimize communication.