Hmm... Can I make it work?

Ok... To begin with, my wife's grandma does taxes for people (has her own license and programs for filing). She is overloaded to the ponit that she can't keep up with everyone, so she is asking me to do some of them, and make some cash at the same time. She has one computer that she could dedicate to me doing taxes, only I'm in Connecticut and she's in South Carolina. Is it possible to operate her computer remotely from my home, having access to her tax preparation programs, and still be able to save everything. I would pretty much have to have complete control over her computer remotely. Any ideas?

~Will Courtier~

if she has windows xp on it, remote desktop connection? i'm not sure about the security of that though.

Yeah, she has remote desktop, but can I access everything on her computer, including a complex program with many databases, and also be able to save and update files?

~Will Courtier~

Yes, you could even user her printer.

And remote desktop is fairly secure.

How do I setup both of our computers for a remote desktop connection? I've never done it before....

Gotomypc.com i think also has software that may do that.

For Remote Desktop (RDP): You need an rdp connection - i.e. go to start, run type in 'mstsc'

She needs to either give you the IP (whatismyip.com) or get a dynamic dns host. Then she'll need (you can help) to forward port 3389 to the computer you'll control. Make sure she sets up a user account on that machine if one isn't known.

The only problem I see is lag. I tried doing RDC from my Mac to my pc (both on the same network) and it lagged like a MOFO.
It might be M$ RDC implementation for MacOS sucked, so I cannot really say either way, but I rather voice a concern...

The slower the connection the slower the lag but I've done it using gprs (which is about as slow as dial up with more latency) and it worked but was laggy. Any connection with faster speeds than that work pretty well.