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GoToMyPC vs. Copilot
By Robert | February 9, 2007
I’ve heard all the loud radio ads and never gave it much thought until I needed to fix my mother-in-law’s computer from 400 miles away.
I tried Fog Creek Software’s Copilot. It was usable in the first fifteen minutes or so, but kinda slow. Then, it got slower… and s-l-o-w-e-r. Then, it froze. Trying their performance tips didn’t help out. Copilot is a VNC mod that works with relay servers and switches over to peer-to-peer mode if the connections allow it. My guess was that we may have not only hit real performance bugs, but also an issue with handling certain firewall configurations that did not switch us back over to their relay server. However, none of this speculation was going to help us get the problem fixed. At least it only cost five bucks for the day pass.
Onto GoToMyPC.com: I was not expecting much because I think their advertising is kind of cheesy. It turns out that I was pleasantly surprised. Though the Copilot software setup was extremely easy, GoToMyPC.com actually worked. We were registered, connected, and had the problem fixed remotely all within a half hour. We did not have to tweak anything to improve performance. Sure it cost a little more, but I’m gonna say this again — it worked. Kudos to the developers at Citrix.
So, don’t let those cheesy radio, print, and online ads fool you (as cheesy as they are, I remembered the name, didn’t I? Kudos to their marketing team as well, then). GoToMyPC works as advertised.
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