TeamViewer-One alternative for LogMeIn Free
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 at 11:17AM
Bob Appleby in LogMeIn, Remote Control, TeamViewer

 

imageOne of the major changes in product availability this past 7 to 10 days that has affected me the most has been the loss of the product called LogMeIn free. This product help me out quite a bit as a management tool between my home in my office PCs. I had made a significant personal commitment to this in purchasing mobile tablet versions of LogMeIn Ignition which allowed me to access my PCs using my phone and either android or IOS tablets. So initially I went back to using our internal product called ScreenConnect but it didn't provide the security that I wanted personally so I get back into the pool to look for another solution.

One of the products it had been bandied about in industry postings, was a product called Team Viewer which has a noncommercial free product and is very much like the LogMeIn Free product that I was leaving behind. I was surprised how quick the connection was to access each of my workstations, much faster than LogMeIn Free was. But the actual capabilities of the program shows at the product is not as mature as LogMeIn Free. It does pass through sound and video fairly well with only a slight degradation of the actual video stream and the sound quality is quite good so those two things are both positive. The actual screen display seems a little bit crisper but that might be my own imagination.

I would say that more than 90% of the things that I would possibly need in doing remote support are there so being a free product this makes this a very viable replacement to LogMeIn Free. It has a very nice file transfer function which allows you to move files between the two machines very easily and again amazingly very quickly. The program takes up just shy of 300 K in memory so it does not require too many resources to run in.

The professional version of TeamViewer also includes online meeting and online presentation modes, has a one time fee but still seems a little bit overpriced to me. It does run on Windows, Mac OS, Linux and most phone operating systems. But I'm not sure I would recommend this product over GoToMeeting, GotoMyPC or the professional version of LogMeIn you know they both have continuing costs over the years. I like the broader range of capabilities that are inherent in those products. One aspect to remember is that when you purchase a license of the commercial version of TeamViewer that you don't have to purchase a license for each of the machines that you are attaching to. Those clients are all free.

WebSite to download software

TeamViewer Brochure

Article originally appeared on Bobs Tech Talk News and Reviews (http://www.bobstechtalk.com/).
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