LogMeIn Free

Just a quick software recommendation today. When away from home, even if I am able to take my laptop with me, there is always something that I want to do that can only be done while sat at my desk, in front of my Desktop machine. This is where LogMeIn Free comes in. This is some software which you install on your machines, and then sign into the website. There you see a list of all the machines associated with your account, and tells you which ones are connected to the internet and are accessible.

In the free version what you can do is limited, but I have found that it does all I need – offers Remote Control of my machine, and allows me some basic Admin control. I can take control of my screen from any web browser in the world (even I found, those in censored China!) and so from there can use something like GMail to send myself a file or print a document to the local printer at home. The Admin offers the basics, allowing control of Windows security, such as password changing etc, but also offers a very useful range of system restart options, ranging from Normal to ‘Hard Reset’.

At home I am the de facto IT Support, and considering I am the only one who knows the passwords to nearly everything, it is likely to stay this way. If I am away on a trip and something goes horribly wrong, this allows a quick check and hopefully fix, instead of trying to visualise the screens the user is seeing, and guide them through the troubleshooting and fix process.

Overall a really useful app which I think is irreplaceable! See more and get it here

Printing Woes… – A follow-up

A few days ago I posted about the lack of printing compatibility as advertised by Apple between OS X & Windows. This has not changed. I have however gotten printing working now between the Mac and Windows. I did this in a rather convoluted way, but it works… The solution was to use LPD Unix Printing. This has to be installed as a Windows Component in Vista, and then manually configured in OS X. I found that OS X did not like the hostname of the Vista machine, and so I have now resorted to disabling DHCP and manually assigning IPs to the machines on the LAN here (about 6 machines) so that I can use the printer attached to Vista. Once it is set up in Vista, the computer’s IP entered in OS X as the lpd:// address, and the printers share name as the Queue name, it suddenly begins working.

While it is not as easy or fast as I would have liked, it is an acceptable compromise. That said I still feel Apple should update their website, or at least include something easy to find in the Support section of their website with detailed instructions on how to do this. I only figured it out having visited about ten 3rd party sites, and using some good old-fashioned trial and error…

Printing Woes…

Recently I bought a MacBook Pro. I decided that for long enough I had been very anti-Mac, and that it was time to get one of my own so that I could get used to it first hand etc. Admittedly I did only even consider this because the new Macs run on Intel architecture, and so I could install Windows XP or Vista onto it using Boot Camp (which I have since done, although OS X is definitely my main OS on here). I was looking forward to the challenge of learning a new OS, and figuring out all the little technical hitches along the way – and for the most part I succeeded. OS X was not as horribly alien or unusable as I had suspected.

However, around the same time I was getting my Mac, my Dad bought a new machine for his home office – a Compaq running Windows Vista. From this machine our only printer – an Epson AL-C1100 Colour Laser – is shared around the network using the standard Windows Printer Sharing. When I purchased my Mac, I did so with all the assurances I was given by the Apple website that OS X integrates flawlessly with Windows networks, and that I would be able to access all of the network resources as before. How wrong it was….

It appears that the compatibility with using the shared printers isn’t there between OS X & Vista, like it was with XP. Bear in mind that I bought this machine in June, and so Vista had been out long enough for Apple to update their software, or update their site to inform me that there would be problems. No matter what I try, including all the solutions online that claim to fix this I simply cannot get printing working from my MacBook Pro.

The two machines are on the same workgroup, and visible from one-another. I can share files between the two, and mount the Vista box’s Public folder through Samba. I therefore know that for this my user credentials are authenticating properly with Vista for File Sharing. However, when I try to access the printer through the Printer Setup Utility on the Mac, I get an authentication error ‘Unable to connect to server with the provided password and user name Error: 256′ The internet has yielded no results for this, and neither has the Apple Support site. When I get the time I will make use of my AppleCare and call a human being for assistance, although I expect I will be told it is a Windows error and they can’t help me…