How Best To Work With Two 'Main' Machines?

We have a home LAN.

Two of the machines are my 'main' machines. One in the house. One in the shed. It'd be nice if I could work from either one and have access to the same apps, the same data.

What's the paradigm these days for doing that?

If you're using Win 10 Pro then you could use the Remote Desktop Connection app to connect from one machine to the other. This would save you having to duplicate apps on both machines and set up shared data.

Alternatively (and especially if you are using Win 10 Home which doesn't include RDC) you can use something like TeamViewer to remote into one machine from the other.

If you do use TeamViewer, I suggest you amend the Options > General settings to either accept or accept exclusively incoming LAN connections.



This prevents any need for TeamViewer to have to go off via the internet for initial handshaking/authentication.

Hope this helps...

In addition to what has been said here, this would simplify the file access, though I've not done it on 10. Some of the other ways of doing this will require you sign into Windows 10, but only for those MS Apps.
Set Up File Sharing on a Windows 10 PC

I thank you all for that input. Very valuable. I'll work through it all, find what fits me best.

Can I add this as background? It might help a bit to focus the discussion. And it might not.

Well years ago I was system admin on a minicomputer. A DEC VAX. And our computing paradigm was simple: everything was on the server and everyone, all the people, merely had terminals.

A beautiful simple system.

Then PC's came along and networking and I became Lan admin for this that and the other, one after the other - IBM Token Ring, Ethernet, Novel.....

And the paradigm changed and we got applications on an application server and app 'server' versions that we installed and so on. And local 'client' stuff that had to be installed on each p.c. And so on.

And now we're at fully distributed computing it seems, I think? And everyone on the LAN has their own total suite of programmes both individual and 'company'.

And I've lost the plot. I really don't understand how the Lan administrator is supposed to run his Lan any more.

So though I think the clues and directions you all have provided will more than set me right and get me to where I can do what I want to do I just wonder should I really be looking into Lan admin for the 'official' methods, paradigms?

And if I should, where to look? Because I've looked ( a little, not a lot ) and I don't find. Haven't found.

Put it this way: if someone gave me a job tomorrow as Lan admin of the twenty computers in their organisation I wouldn't know with any confidence what to do, where to start.

Where once I confidently ran a hospital full of 'em. But that was way back at win3.1 would you believe.

Yes, I try to keep all data on D:. But so many times downloads just go to the default windows 'downloads' dir. Is there a way to relocate that?

My efforts with file syncing so far have been aborted by transmission errors and the app just stops - or the transfer goes on and on and on and I stop it - or even computer crashes.

And that latter: computer crashes - has stopped me even getting a machine back up to where I was at two years ago, would you believe? It's true.

This one here is on an Asus H170 and it's beginning to crap itself too, again, now, before I've got it built up agains since the system drive crash it last had. It runs incredibly slowly on startup. Where Task manager reports no 100% usage on anything, there's mem space, there's cpu cycles available, there's disk space... but it crawls.

Try to use the search bar and sometimes can't type in it. Sometimes get a 'ghost' of the app list that comes up when you click the windows icon - i mean it's like a see-through image of it.

That kind of weird thing.

Not the subject of this thread. sorry. Just me babbling on.

Thanks for the suggestions. :)

hmmm. quite right. shows how off-balance I am. I was thinking of it as a windows thing but of course it's a browser thing.

I use firefox mainly and I just did a quick google and it's no problem to change it. thanks for waking me up. :)