Monitor a Laptop or Desktop PC from a Mobile Device
by Marco Chiappetta - originally published at PC World Magazine
If you are still wasting time trudging over to PCs to
perform routine maintenance on them, check for software updates, and power them
down at night, you haven't gotten with the program. Here's how to check on your
PCs from anywhere, and save your business both time and money.
Get started: A number of remote PC management utilities are
available, but we'll focus on an excellent tool called PC Monitor
(www.mobilepcmonitor.com), which is free for three PCs. It works with Android,
iOS, and Windows Phone OSs, as well as with Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.
Install PC Monitor: Installing and configuring PC Monitor
requires just a few steps, and the default setup options should be sufficient.
Install the appropriate application on each system that you want to monitor.
The first time you launch the PC Monitor Manager, it will
prompt you to create an account for connecting your PCs to your mobile devices
(or for monitoring the systems via the Web). At your first login, enter a
computer name and a group name for the system.
Customize your counters: To configure a custom monitor or
counter (for CPU use, say), click the System tab, and work your way
through the tabs in the pane: General, Services, Network, and so on. The
Schedule Tasks tab lets you enable the monitor simply by ticking a task. Under
the Performance Counters tab in the System pane, you can set up custom counters
based on criteria that you specify.
Set up notification alerts: To get the most from PC Monitor
and to have it notify you the moment something critical occurs, click the
program's Notifications tab, and then click through the tabs in the resulting
Notifications pane, enabling appropriate alerts as you go. These alerts may
include when the computer starts up or shuts down, when particular users sign
on, when someone plugs in a removable drive, or when a processor begins to
overheat. More advanced notification options may require you to set up rules
manually.
Grab the PC Monitor mobile app:
After installing the PC Monitor app on the relevant PCs, you
must install and configure the companion mobile app on your mobile devices.
Select a PC: Upon signing in to PC Monitor, you should see a
list of your systems. Tap a system name in the list to bring up an overview of
the system.
Monitor your PC from your couch: If you've enabled
notifications already, all that remains is to explore the mobile app for
monitoring and managing your systems. PC Monitor will send alerts if necessary,
but the mobile app also provides real-time data.
After you tap a system name in the left pane of the app, the
right pane will become populated with system details and buttons for performing
various tasks, including such options as opening a command prompt, checking for
OS updates, and restarting the monitored system. In addition, you can use the
PC Monitor mobile app to send messages back to the associated desktop PC, if
you want to alert the PC's user.
After the application is installed on a system, the PC
Monitor service runs in the background. During our testing, the service rarely,
if ever, consumed a detectable amount of CPU time, and it used no more than
44MB of RAM.
