How To Control Your PC from Windows Mobile Cell Phone
Hey, Hey, Hey! It’s your friendly neighborhood admin coming at you again with another awesome use for your Windows Mobile Device. I am talking about Remote Desktop.
Have you ever been away from your desktop and needed some information that was on it? Have you ever needed to shutdown your computer or do something underhanded while away? What did you do? Run home? Ryan, showed you how to restart or shut down your PC over the Internet but I am going to show you how to control your PC from your Windows Mobile phone.
Well, this is a much better solution! Our solution comes installed on most Windows Mobile Devices with touch-screens but some carriers cheaped out and did not include it. For those devices, you can still grab the remote desktop client from here.
We have previously covered other options like VNC and you can read about that here, and even remote controlling your Windows Mobile Device from your computer, which is the reverse process of what we are trying to achieve here.
Remote desktop can be found on your Start Menu and it looks like this:
Once you open the Remote Desktop application, you will see a screen asking you for your connection information. If you have ever used Remote Desktop from your computer, it is very similar. You will need to know your username, password and your domain. You will also have to make sure that port 3389 is opened and mapped to your desktop that you want to connect to. If you are unsure of how to do this, you can check out this web site on port forwarding.
Once you have the prerequisites worked out, you just need to launch the application from your phone and fill in the details.
You can see from the screenshot above that I obscured my information so you hackers out there don’t decide to DOS my servers! But after you fill in your computer name, username, password and domain you have the option to select the check box to save your password.
Then, you can hit the Options button and see what your options are…
You can choose either 256 colors for a faster experience or 16-bit colors for a truer desktop-like experience. You may also select for the remote desktop to run full resolution on your device or have the remote screen scaled down to fit your mobile device’s screen.
You can also map your storage to the remote machine as well as play sounds on your device or on the local computer. You can also disable the sound all together. Try the options out and see which combination works best for you.
When you are done tweaking, we are ready to give our remote connection a try! Are you ready?
And just like that…
We have our desktop on our mobile devices, and we can do whatever it is we needed to do – just as if we were sitting in front of the machine! In other word, I have full control over PC from Windows Mobile phone. So, I can open up files, start a downloading a torrent or control my music! This is simply awesome and seeming it is already installed on your device – you should give it a try today! Let us know how it went for you. If you have any questions, please shoot them in the comments section.
(By) Karl Gechlik is a superhero of the IT industry. His days are spent monitoring and maintaining systems on Wall Street. He helps people with their technical issues for free over at AskTheAdmin.com.
I don’t show “resources” but rather “Sound”
Also when I log back into my machine, it is now in 256 color mode.
Also various key strokes don’t come across. for example, I tried to send an email via gmail and it would not accept the letter “i” or other letters.
any advice?
Jim – I recommend using the free version of LogMeIn.com instead. I can access many computers without having to set up port forwarding, have a domain, static IP, etc… I manage all my friends and family’s computers remotely anytime they need help just using this free program and free install for Windows Mobile. Just my 2 cents.
I could not get logmein free to work on Windows Mobile – I tried but my desktop never showed up. It went through all the motions though.
(Comments wont nest below this level)Play with the settings on the Windows Mobile side… there is a spot to adjust the screen to “fit to mobile” or something like that. I know I have logged in before and was only seeing a small portion of my desktop, which was black, so it looked like I wasn’t seeing anything. Hold your stylus on the bottom or right side of the screen and it will scroll around the full desktop screen of your home computer. I’ve used LogMeIn on my Dell PPC, my Sprint 6700, Sprint 6800, Treo 800w, etc. Works great!
Remote desktop for windows mobile rocks… this is truly awesome. Thanks for the article.
So do i have to set up my own domain with my computers ip address for this to work?
Good job giving us your domain name and your username. Now it’s only a matter of time before the password is brute forced or a buffer overflow is found in that software.
I use the remote desktop software because of how much time it saves me sitting at my home computer searching the web. I often download movies to watch online. Of course movies take a long time to download so I try to start the download as early as possible. Before I used my remote desktop software I was unable to start the download until I was physically sitting in front of my home computer. Now when I come home my movies are already downloaded on my PC. It’s pretty sweet.