I recently purchased PCAnywhere 11.5 because I use two monitors at work and wanted to telecommute and use both monitors. Windows Terminal Services (for Win2k or Win2k3) does not support dual monitors, so I bought PCAnywhere.

The results weren't very good. Either PCAnywhere isn't trying hard enough or Microsoft is using internal capabilities that PCAnywhere is unable to tap into. It may be a mix of both.

PCA has several advantages that I saw:
1. PCA has file transfer capability. MS TS does not have any such capability.
2. PCA supports multiple monitors. MS TS can only support one monitor.

Sadly, PCA comes up short when compared to MS TS.
1. It is significantly faster compared to PCA for the same resolution. I logged into the machine with PCA with just one screen at 1600x1200x256 and it was very much slower than MS TS at 1600x1200x16mil.
2. It does support dual monitors, but you can't be in full screen mode when you do dual monitors (even though I have dual monitors at home as well).
3. You can't connect at different resolutions like MS TS can. If my home system has a higher resolution than my work system then I want to connect at that higher resolution.
4. PCA doesn't seem capable of connecting to the console session. I'm not sure about this. I'd need to experiment further to determine if that is possible.
5. When in full screen mode, PCA annoyingly does not map the alt-tab key to the remote session. This may be settable, but if it is then I don't know how.

All in all, I think the speed was by far the biggest issue. The second biggest issue is being unable to go to full screen when using dual monitors. Not having that capability essentially makes working in that manner to be highly tiresome due to all the scrolling I need to do. That could be fixed if I changed the resolution on the remote computer to be lower than my local computer, but I don't want to do that.

The only big complaint I have about MS TS is the total lack of dual monitor support.
Version 4.1 last modified by Geoff Fortytwo on 14/05/2008 at 01:21

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Creator: Geoff Fortytwo on 2008/05/12 01:16
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