Run Your Desktop PC from your Handheld PC with pcANYWHERE CE

pcANYWHERE lets you control desktop PCs running Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.5/4 from across the room or around the world.

By Don Hergert

I did an interesting thing this morning at work. I called my computer at home and beat it in a game of Reversi. While winning the game was a significant accomplishment for me, more important was the fact that I was able to run my home computer from the office using a Cassiopeia A-11 Handheld PC running Symantec's new pcANYWHERE CE remote control software. Over the last few months I have been fortunate enough to be a beta tester for this program. I am thoroughly impressed with it.

I'm a big user of communication gadgets. In my day work I manage and develop on a large scale a UNIX-based system for a prominent medical center in Southern California. This system is the centerpiece for 25 or so other systems throughout the medical center. If this system has problems, they need to be fixed before the absence of data flow affects patient care. I'm on call all the time, frequently even on vacation, a situation that is not at all unusual at this level in the health care industry.

This is where my appreciation for handhelds comes from. While at home, I can use my desktop system to interface with the medical center's UNIX system and fix problems. Away from home, I've found that the more powerful handhelds and palmtops provide sufficient communication capabilities to do my work from just about anywhere.

Though the applications provided as part of Windows CE are powerful, it seems that they are really only intended to serve as compact, portable assistants to their office suite counterparts on the desktop. This is facilitated by the H/PC's communication capability as it provides a path for interchange of data between both machines. In contrast, Symantec, with the introduction of pcANYWHERE CE, has provided an effective tool that allows us to literally reverse those roles and make the Handheld PC master of the desktop PC.

This Handheld PC screen shows pcANYWHERE running a Windows 95 desktop PC. A toolbar at the top of the screen contains the tools needed to maneuver around the desktop PC's screen that is only partially displayed here on the Handheld PC.

pcANYWHERE — a remote control package

For those not familiar with pcANYWHERE, it is a software package that lets you use one computer to remotely control another. pcANYWHERE is available for DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows NT, and now for Windows CE platforms. Both computers must be connected together via telephone lines and modems (or directly cabled together), and each needs to be running either the Host or Remote part of the software package. The computer doing the controlling calls up the other computer, and can run programs and access data and peripherals on it.

The pcANYWHERE CE version of the program lets Windows CE H/PC users remotely control a PC that is running Windows 95, Windows NT3.5 or Windows NT4. Although you cannot transfer files back and forth with pcANYWHERE CE, you can cut and paste information to and from the computers.

Tools for maneuvering around a desktop's screen

pcANYWHERE displays the entire screen of the desktop on the Handheld's much smaller screen. This potentially could make viewing a desktop PC's much larger screen difficult. Fortunately, Symantec has devised a clever and effective series of tools for moving around the desktop PC's screen and enlarging a portion of it. This makes it possible to fully control any application running under Windows 95 or Windows NT, almost as easily as it would be to do so on the full sized PC. The convenience of being able to remotely access and control another PC from a device as small and easy to carry as an H/PC far outweighs any slight inconvenience in maneuvering around the desktop PC's screen on the H/PC.
 

The following shots illustrate the three different toolbars that can be selected:

 The tools are placed on a toolbar at the top of the screen. The toolbars can also be hidden to provide more space for the H/PC to display the desktop PC's screen. Among the buttons included on the toolbars are the following:

The scale button fits the controlled PC's complete screen into the H/PCs screen,

The zoom button lets you navigate through the fitted screen and choose an area to zoom into,

The scroll button lets you turn on scroll bars for navigating through a zoomed screen,

The hand button lets you enable a drag-scroll tool which allows you to navigate through the zoomed screen by dragging the whole screen around.

Together these tools allow the user to get around the controlled PC's screens with very little effort.

In addition to the toolbar for screen navigation, there are four more buttons and two alternate toolbars that provide keyboard and special functions equivalent to that of the PC being controlled. They include the ability to send a (CTRL)+(ALT)+(DEL) login sequence for Windows NT4 systems, to transfer text through the two PCs clipboards, to reboot the controlled PC, to exit pcANYWHERE CE, and to emulate function keys F1 through F12 and special function keys like Num Lock and Print Screen.

Making the initial connection

Installation of pcANYWHERE CE is a smooth, two-part process. Once setup is started, both the Windows 95 / Windows NT4 host portion and the Windows CE remote portion of the software are loaded onto the desktop machine. Once the host portion installation is completed, the remote portion can immediately be loaded directly onto the Windows CE machine, or can be loaded at a later time. Either way, the installation of the Windows CE remote part of pcANYWHERE CE uses H/PC Explorer (which must have been previously installed) to automatically install the right CPU version for the attached H/PC.

After installation, pcANYWHERE CE must be configured on both machines for the expected type of connection that will be made. The connections can be made using various types of direct or modem connections, or using a TCP/IP PPP connection on a Windows NT4 desktop system. Additionally, the desktop machine can be configured to bring up the host portion of the software when turned on, and can be configured to reboot itself when a remote control session is ended. After the configurations are complete, the desktop system is left with the host portion of pcANYWHERE CE running, waiting for a connection to be made.

While the H/PC's relationship with a desktop PC is probably the smoothest example of this kind of communication in the industry today, it can still be very challenging. A number of the underlying communication methods used in Windows CE are fairly complicated to work with, and are made even more so because of a few "undocumented features" which exist within this communications framework. Problems with setting parity and word length, and problems associated with the H/PC "forgetting" previous settings when devices are changed are a few examples.

Every communication-related program on the platform, including pcANYWHERE CE, uses this communication framework. Probably the most challenging phase of using pcANYWHERE CE is the initial connection. To illustrate this and the remaining aspects of using pcANYWHERE CE, I'll further describe the Reversi exercise I began this article with.

Dialing up my home computer

To play Reversi, the first thing I had to do was to dial up my home computer. Normally this would just involve attaching the phone line to the modem and telling pcANYWHERE CE to call home. There are, however, a number of problems associated with trying to dial out from my office. Because I am an employee of a large institution, I have to use a modem pool to dial out from my desktop, which must be running special non-Windows CE software to access it. I can't use the modem pool with my Handheld PC.

Another obstacle was our digital phone system. Many large organizations use them. Even though they use RJ"-11 jacks, a digital phone system applies significantly more voltage to those lines. That means that if you attach a modem designed for a regular analog system to one of these lines, you'll most likely jolt it into history.

One of my favorite communication gadgets is a high-speed acoustic coupler. This lets me use a modem with just about any phone. The one I carry (a Phone Coupler II from Black Box) can support communication rates up to 14.4kbps. Pay phones, hotel phone systems, international phone systems, old non-RJ-11 phone systems -- all are usable with this device. I've also been known to attach it to my cellular phone and use this "kludge" to modem into work from the mountains.

Another favorite gadget of mine is an old battery-powered 14.4kbps pocket modem. While I do have a PCMCIA modem, I only use it with the AC adapter connected. Even the best PC Card modem will eat batteries on handhelds and notebooks, so when there is no external power around, the pocket modem goes to work. It is also handy when I don't want to pull my 10 Mb flash disk from the PCMCIA slot on the H/PC, which is happening more and more lately.

To get around the modem-frying phone system at my office, I hooked up my Cassiopeia to my pocket modem, to my acoustic coupler, to my office phone's handset.

I had to manually dial the phone, but other than that it worked well. (Normal analog phone systems can auto-dial with this hardware combination.) I was able to maintain a stable connection with the remote connection being successfully made through the two modems' auto baud mechanism at 14.4kbps, with the H/PC-to-modem connection on my side set at 4.8kbps, no parity, 8 bit words and hardware handshaking. (Most high-speed modems automatically select baud in their connection to the modem on the other end - unless this feature is turned off - making the speed that is set on the PC really just the speed of communication between the computer and the modem. Buffering and handshaking take care of the differences between the two speeds.)

The H/PC and the pocket modem also were attached to their AC adapters so battery power would not be a concern. I also had to turn off error correction on the H/PC using the AT/N0 modem command in the pcANYWHERE CE communication setup on the H/PC, having previously turned it off using a similar mechanism on my desktop machine at home.

After the manual dialing connection was made, I was prompted for and entered my user name and password, exactly as I had dictated them during the initial setup of pcANYWHERE on my desktop PC. Once that was completed, the H/PC screen cleared, and I was treated to a very small, yet complete copy of my home desktop PC's SVGA screen, with a light outline of a box over a portion of that screen, indicating the H/PC's normal 480 by 240 pixel display capacity. I tapped that outline, and in a second I was in that exact portion of the desktop PC's screen, zoomed to a point where everything was very readable.

Tap on the zoom icon on the toolbar and the outlined area is zoomed to fit the entire screen, making it easier to read.

Then I maneuvered through my desktop PC's menu system, brought up Reversi, and played the game, using the stylus on the H/PC as pcANYWHERE CE effectively emulated mouse positioning and clicking. And, to my own amazement, I won.

After taking time to savor the moment, I pressed the disconnect button in the toolbar, and began putting everything away.

A wish list

While pcANYWHERE CE is great, there are still a few things I'd like to see in it. Even though Windows CE provides terminal emulation through its Terminal Connection, its emulation is missing a number of important VT100 and ANSI terminal characteristics which are really necessary for accurate screen displays. Worse, it offers no file transfer. I'd really like to see a complete terminal emulator embedded in pcANYWHERE CE, and I'd also like to see file transfer possible. Maybe next version.

Before I bought a Windows CE H/PC, I was using an HP 200LX palmtop computer. It is an amazing machine, too. But my primary reason for having any portable is to provide a way to communicate with my work computers. And, my work computers are changing. Probably within a year, or maybe two, the UNIX-based interface I manage at work will be running under Windows NT. Until Windows CE came out, it looked like my only option was a full-blown notebook PC. I wasn't looking forward at all to this change. Now, with pcANYWHERE CE, I am not only ready, but I'm anxious for this change to occur. I'm very thankful to Symantec for putting this product together.

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