Whether you're across the room or across the globe, there are various methods of remotely accessing your box. If you know how to use a web browser, then you already have the know-how to log into your, say, office PC from anywhere.

You may not already know this, but before the creation of remote desktop applications that make this sort of thing a piece of cake, users were already remotely logging into their boxes.

One way of doing this is via FTP, which is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. Put simply, you'd install an FTP server on the computer you'd wish to log into and ensure that the FTP port, usually port 21, is open so that you can access it remotely. Once your FTP server is up and running on the host computer, you'd install and run an FTP client from a PC in a remote location, 10 feet way or 100 miles away, for example. The FTP client communicates with the FTP server, effectively letting you log into a directory structure where you can transfer files to and fro. FTP is not incredibly intuitive to use, but it's one of the first examples of remotely accessing your computer.

Another more arcane example is called telnet. The process is basically the same as FTP: a telnet server runs on the host computer while you'd log into it via a telnet client. Telnet is even less intuitive than FTP since it's all text-based, so if you're not used to command-line tools, as many *NIX users are, you may dislike telnet from the get-go if you're a Windows user. Nowadays, it's recommended that you use the more secure SSH--secure shell--as it's less prone to exploits than telnet and much safer to use from a security standpoint.

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As technology inevitably marches on and improves upon itself evermore increasingly, the web browser is becoming more and more the mother application to run all children applications from, so to speak. Desktop apps are being elbowed aside to make room for more convenient, web-based apps that execute inside your favorite browser fluidly and without a hitch, as web browsers are becoming more powerful and more intelligent as processing power gets cheaper and new coding techniques, not to mention standards, dictate the norm.

GoToMyPC is the number one remote PC program on the market and it works on Mac;s and PC's. It comes with a free 30 day trial and it is touted as a way to access your home or office computer from anywhere you please. You're not simply limited to a text-based shell interface or a crude representation of a designated file structure from a remote location, but you're given the full power to access all of your precious files and all your PC's resources, graphically. Distantly log in from your home PC into your work PC and grab your e-mails, documents and applications. As long as your remote PC is internet-capable and has a web browser installed, then you can access your distant PC that's running GoToMyPC. Of course, the issue of security and exploits pop up when anyone talks about opening up an Internet gateway into your PC; for peace of mind, GoToMyPC uses 128-bit AES encryption, so you can feel relatively secure using this remote desktop solution.

The beauty of GoToMyPC is that it installs over the web through a simple and sound process. You don't need to install or download any bloated applets to communicate with your host PC; you can use any web browser to do this task! A lot of desktop solutions have issues running behind a firewall or proxy server, but GoToMyPC doesn't have any problem running behind most security software. One feature that comes in handy is the ability to allow guest access to your remote PC, allowing you to set time limits for which guest access should expire for an extra layer of security. Transferring files and printing from a remote location has not been this easy, so if you're in the market for a remote desktop app, give GoToMyPC a test drive.