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Short Notice: LogMeIn To Discontinue Free Access
An anonymous reader writes "The remote desktop service LogMeIn sent an email to its users today notifying them that 'LogMeIn Free' will be discontinued — as of today. This is a major shock with minimal warning to the millions of users who have come to rely on their service, made all the more surprising by the fact that 'consensus revenue estimates for LogMeIn in 2014 are $190.3 million,' suggesting that their system of providing both free and paid accounts for what is ultimately a straightforward service that could be duplicated for well under $1 million was already doing quite well." Asks reader k280: "What alternative tools are available for free, and how do they compare to LogMeIn?"
Personally, I just set up two DNS servers, and my own dyndns service (inspired on freedns.afraid.org) and I make sure the people I support have the necessary port forwards for ssh using keys. From there on, it's just an ssh tunnel away for RDP or VNC.
Now, for a nice all-in-one-package, where you don't need to do anything yourself and don't need to prepare the target PC's, I'd say TeamViewer works perfectly fine.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Chrome Remote Desktop doesn't have all the bells and whistles that LogMeIn has, but it's simple and works well.
Although join.me is by logmein this one seems to be free so try to use join.me instead of a connection pc 2 pc is what your looking for. works great for troubleshooting a complete noob that messed is pc up and calls you at midnight to fix his pc.
Theres also teamviewer that works in a similar way like join.me and logmein. You can remotely log in a pc and work on it. Skype also has a share screen function so you might look at that as well
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
Logmein loses 99% of their user base. :)
made all the more surprising by the fact that 'consensus revenue estimates for LogMeIn in 2014 are $190.3 million,' suggesting that their system of providing both free and paid accounts for what is ultimately a straightforward service that could be duplicated for well under $1 million was already doing quite well.
Why is it surprising that a company might want to do better than "quite well" when it sees the opportunity?
Also:
what is ultimately a straightforward service that could be duplicated for well under $1 million
Go on then. Or was that number just pulled out of someone's behind?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
TeamViewer recently pushed an "update" that imposes a fairly short time limit on the free connections. This was not mentioned to the users prior to running the update. It also "upgraded your account" online so you can no longer run the older unlimited version of teamviewer.
That, combined with the obsession about not wanting you to install your licensed copy on more than one support computer (despite being totally online and trivially blocked from simultaneous instances) lead me to drop my support for them as well. We even bought a license, but having to bump someone from the machine it's registered on just to remote into someone else here is a hassle. Just another example of making users "regret upgrading". That's a horrible business model.
There really isn't any good free 3rd party alternative out there that I've seen. I can map ports and even have set up remote check-ins to manage changing IP addresses, but being able to automatically traverse routers (uPNP) I haven't managed to replicate yet. The easiest thing for me at this point, since I run mac, is to simply use FaceTime's screen sharing, which provides the auto check-in for dynamic IPs and also does a good job of getting in through routers. The last os upgrade was free even, which makes it a bit cheaper than LogMeIn or TeamViewer ;)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It allows remote login to desktop computers that are online from any other desktop computer. The free version was meant for consumers; the paid version is used by a lot of IT and tech support companies who support remote users because it's a heck of a lot easier than driving over there, and doesn't need to be on the same domain like RDP.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
There is no automatic method of cancelling your account. You have to call the tech support line at https://secure.logmein.com/con... for your locale. All you can do on the site is delete the computers on your account. As of this post, I cannot get through to the US & Canada line, just getting a busy signal. Apparently I'm not the only one following this route. As has been mentioned in other posts there are plenty of free options out there capable of the same features that a free LogMeIn account was capable of doing.