Remote Desktop - Please Please Help

[Pack'nHeat]

I'm disabled with ALS and will be going to a "nursing home" style place for this coming week to give my caregivers a break. I am scrambling to figure this out.

I believe there are 2 different setups "slandered" and "web".
I have a Desktop going to my router and a Laptop running wireless off of it.
I set them up using the standard setup because both are running XP Pro. Because both are on the same network, I just put in the name and password of the host on my laptop and it works great.

Now when I turn wireless off on my laptop and plug it in via phone modem , I am no longer in the network. I thought that the only difference would be that I would put in the host's IP # instead of the host's computer name and use the same password, but this isn't working.

I'm guessing that because I'm off the network, the router is my problem. Does port forwarding come into play now? I have a Dell TrueMobile 1184 router.

I know it's something simple. Please let me know if you can help.

Thanks :)

[Tuttle]

Yeah, this is where port forwarding comes into play - forward port 3389/TCP to your desktop. Also, you'll need to be using your public IP address in the remote desktop client on your laptop, not the internal one you've assigned the desktop PC.

If your public IP address is likely to change, this might be a good time to investigate something like NoIP (www.no-ip.com).

[Pack'nHeat]

Ok... I access the router with 192.168.2.1. I go to the Advanced Settings and see - IP Address pool range is 192.168.2._ 2 to 100

so in port forwarding -> custom port forwarding my internal ip address should be? 192.168.2."?"

Then just type in whatismyip.com for my external address and use that on the remote?

[wetling]

You going to a hospice? Good luck. My uncle had ALS.

Your router should tell you what the external IP address is.

[Tuttle]

Run ipconfig on your desktop to work out its internal IP address; that's the address you need to forward port 3389 to. It'll be a 192.168.2.* address.

Somewhere in the router config it should list the external IP address (which won't start with 192.168). That's a more reliable indicator than sites like whatismyip.com, which can return incorrect results if your ISP runs a transparent proxy.