Using laptop screen as external moniter

Hey, I have a desktop pc that I'm trying to work on, and I hate the monitor, hurts my eyes. Is it possible to control the desktop with my laptop?

Meaning, connect the desktop to my laptop and be able to work on it as if I'm using the desktops screen keyboard and mouse

 

RealVNC, UltraVNC, or any VNC application will do; best part is, they're all free (or at least have a free option).

 

Might be some kind of USB thing to do it. USB is duct tape of connecting things together.

 

So any one of those programs will allow me to control my desktop from my laptop? Is that going to be Remote? Is there any way to do it with a VGA cable or something like that?

Thanks for the info btw.

 

I use windows remote pc.

 

Does windows remote pc work well. I'm wondering if it might be a problem that my laptop is vista and the desktop is xp sp2.

 

So, there is no way of doing it through cables? VGA? USB?

 

First, VNC is always remote, all you need is a network and nothing else, I frequently connect to my PC at home from school, but to connect outside your network, you'll have to do some port forwarding on your router, but everything's pretty straight-forward within a network.

With Remote PC, you have to give permission to let a computer control your computer (I find this annoying, especially because I can't be there to click "ok") while VNC does authentication before you connect and there's no action needed on the other end. If you do like the idea of being able accept connections, you can also do that with VNC. You'll have to refer to your software's documentation as different programs are configured differently.

Hopefully this helps.

 

So, there is no way of doing it through cables? VGA? USB?

I figured that being that you can view your laptop screen on an external monitor. That you'd be able to reverse it and use the laptop as an external monitor for the desktop!

Edit: Sorry for the double post.

 

*see my post above, you posted right after I did

Desktop and Laptop VGA ports are VGA-out so they wouldn't recognize each other, a network is much simpler anyways.

 

No, any video designed port in an out. Outs cant go in. Square no go through circle :-D

http://www.cablestogo.com/product.asp?cat_id=1525&sku=30534

Looks expensive.

 

Thanks Bchen06. I'll look into this VNC program. What do you think about ultraVNC, it's free. Does anyone have any experience with this.

 

Yea........I think I am going to stick to remote desktop.

 

http://www.realvnc.com/products/download.html

I've used this extensively. I used it to play Ragnarok Online from school on my homes computer. Just get two computers up to a LAN and it will work beautiful.

If on Vista I would use the demo of the Personal.

 

I prefer RealVNC (I have a Professional License for it) because it looks cleaner than UltraVNC. But if you don't mind having a slightly bulkier GUI, I've used UltraVNC, and it does what VNC is designed to do very well.

 

Thanks everyone for the help, in terms of lag, are all these programs the same.

 

I played a MMORPG game with RealVNC and it was maybe a little lag but, that was a MMORPG.

On a LAN you arent going to be seeing that much lag really.

 

Alright, I decided I'm going to go VNC. Thanks a lot, I appreciate the input. And thanks to everyone who helped me out.

Cheers.

 

Remote Desktop will provide a much less laggy experience than any VNC solution. VNC literally encodes and compresses your desktop as an image in realtime and transmits it across the network. That's a lot of data and drains CPU power on the PC being controlled and easily saturates a 100Mb network.

Remote Desktop is a much neater solution, using much less horespower and network bandwidth. I won't go into a big explanation (unless someone wants it, in which case PM me) but it sounds far more suitable for our needs.