screen sharing two macs. Snappy?

I am thinking of getting an MBA as a second computer.

One thing I am interested in, particularly after discovering how painfully slow it is to access a remote drive on the AEBS, is screen sharing significantly faster?

1) If I was at home screen sharing from my MBP, would it work pretty much in 'real time'?

2) Same question but when on the road.

Very grateful for any pointers. A search led to some posts about remote access but did not cover this question

 

If you use a VNC client to share your screens, then things will happen in real time. There are other protocols you could use, but VNC is the most popular.

 

Thanks. I was intending to use Leopard's built in screen sharing... If I understand correctly this is VNC

 

Painfully slow AEBS? I find that wireless is painfully slow but if you are sharing over gigabit ethernet it's not so slow. I turn off the wireless on my Macbook and use gigabit because everything goes a little smoother. My Time Machine backups finish faster. If I move a few gigs of files around, it takes minutes rather than hours. OTOH, I don't find screen sharing to be painful over wifi. Much less data is being sent than would be sent if I was moving huge folders full of music or photos around. I wouldn't play a high frame rate game like a first person shooter over VNC, but for everyday use it's just fine.

 

I meant that file transfer from my MBP to an external hard drive mounted on my AEBS is painfully slow. If I wanted to use cables then I would plug it directly into my MBP

Thanks for the screen sharing info... Now I am watching for information on an MBA update

 

The issue for me isn't simply using the cables. It's the physical location I must travel to in order to use the cables. I've got gigabit ethernet in the basement and first floor. The second floor is "all wireless".

I never try to copy gigabits of data to or from "upstairs" because 802.11n isn't nearly as fast as gigabit ethernet. For me, a significant value in an external hard drive is it needs to be on the network so I can get to it from anywhere. If it's a small amount of data, I live with wifi. If it's a huge amount of data, I plug in ethernet. At least I don't have to trudge all the way to the basement to get access to the external drive. My perception is that gigabit ethernet is about as fast as usb but not quite as fast as firewire. Gigabit ethernet for me seems about 10 times faster than 802.11n which upshifts and downshifts depending on whether somebody is sending something to one of the 802.11g printers on our network.

 

Gotcha.

In this case my main interest is finding out to what extent I can 'run' my MBP from an MBA... so that when at home I wouldn't even need to think about copying files to my MBA - I could just share into my MBP (which would be cabled to an external drive), and am curious about how well this performs.

 

For your needs, the built-in screen sharing that comes with OS X should work just fine. Of course, if you start playing video or a game on your MBP, expect some ugliness to happen when you are viewing from your MBA. But for every day use, you should be in good shape.

When I first got a Mac, it was a G4 Mini. I put it down in the basement and ran it "headless." I operated it from my pc using a vnc viewer. I found that I became more and more impressed with how well OS X worked and how clean it was so when it was time to replace my Dell, I purchased a Macbook. I am impressed with how well screen sharing was integrated with the OS.

 

Thanks for the reply and interesting info So the data would not stream fast enough for watching a movie on iTunes? Interesting...

 

leopards built in screen sharing is excellent and it does use the VNC protocol.

I highly recommend using leopards built in Screen Sharing App for any VNC action to any other type of system as well.

for the record, I doubt there is any screen sharing protocol that can transfer data quick enough for smooth video play back, that is a lot of pixels to transfer.

 

I have an iMac that I use as a server at home and access it locally and remotely with a number of Mac's.

If I am local (on the same network) screen sharing is very responsive even over wireless. I could work on the iMac using local screen sharing. When I access remotely, screen sharing is useable but slow - it depends on the internet connection. Its ok to do minor things but I would not want to actually use it to remotely work on that machine. Other VNC clients I've tried seem about the same speed.

When I connect locally to the iMac for file sharing purposes making use of the OS X features, its pretty responsive, even over wireless. But when I access it remotely, file sharing is incredibly slow. I resorted to running RUMPUS on the iMac which gives me HTTP/FTP access and this is much quicker than OS X file sharing remotely for some reason.

Hope this helps

 

Hi circa,
I would definitely agree with you, As i'm a user of leopards, i'm really satisfied with the way it works. But recently one of my friends started using a screen sharing software from livelook, also working greatly for him. Anyhow thanks a lot for the posts.

 

I've used Synergy before and it's a really neat experience. It's ultrafast and using 2 separate computers(and OS) felt seemless. This is a cross platform utility and allowed systems on Windows or OSX to share displays(well sort of) by sharing they keyboard and mouse.

For macs, you will need to download the OSX version of Synergy and Synergy KM (which is the GUI wrapper).