Missed the needing to work on files thing.

Just use the laptop as your primary machine.

When home plug you monitor keyboard into it and enjoy the extra display space.

If you are doing standard office stuff Word, excell, Mail etc... none of it is taxing for a laptop.

I have been using laptops almost exclusively for 5-6 years.

I keep desktops at home and in the office and only fire them up when I need to work on several different projects simultaneously otherwise it's all on my laptop.

What Dave said, that is how I set up my system

Hacked Vista Premium to allow Remote Desktop.
Set up Home Office computer as a server using Dyndns.org with dynamic DSL.
Make sure to download and install IP updater from DYNDNS if you have DSL.

Set up my Work Office with a Netgear VPN router and use their VPN software.

Use Gmail to control calendar and emails. The beauty of Gmail is it stores everything on the internet. You can obtain sent and trashed emails as well as the new stuff. Outlook will leave stuff on the server but a sent email from one computer will not be on the other.

All of this is free(except router) and can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

Kind of sucks since basically I am always connected to work. No excuses.

You guys are the best!

I could have spent all day searching for info that I don't understand, stressing over 'breaking something' on my computer, and generally not getting what I want.


Pelican OT is my first stop for learning new stuff.


Thanks a lot to all!

and... if you let Outlook pull Email down off the server, then there will be different msgs stored on each computer.

for that reason, I only use Outlook on 1 computer - others do not pull down Email

Outlook 2007 allows you to leave a copy of the message on the server, however there isn't an easy way to have access to sent mail without a remote access sort of solution.

I'm having a tough time accepting that using my webmail account is the way to go (it would have to be Yahoo as that is our website and email host) but mostly because I have spent millions of hours in front of the outlook interface and am very comfortable with it. Old habits die hard.

oh yeh - I am stuck in the past - still using Get OFF Us 2000

MM you failed to mention if your office/work has a file server and exchange server, or if you are just using one PC as a file server/pop3 email server?

There's a lot of way of skinning the cat...

umm, this one I think.


Now I'm toying around with the idea of having an external HD with a 'quick backup' feature where I can pick the files 'backed up' which would be my doc files, mail and contacts files, etc.


I'm still a little lost here, but like what I'm learning.