Remote Control your Windows PC with Email or SMS

It's a long weekend and you're happy because you'll get to spend the next three days with your family. You left the office in an excited mood but as the cab was approaching home, you suddenly realized that you forgot to shut down the Office PC. Oops!

It's a sinking feeling because there're so many confidential documents on the computer and since most of your trusted colleagues have also left for the day, there's no point calling them for help. So what do you do?

Drive back to Office? Well that's not required - just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation. And if you share the same computer with multiple people, you can use another email command to remotely log off or even shut down the computer from anywhere in the world.






There's no magic here, it's the power of TweetMyPC utility that lets you remote control your computer from a mobile phone or any other Internet connected computer.


TweetMyPC


TweetMyPC is a little software-application for Windows, written in VB.Net using the .Net-Framework v3.5 SP1, which allows you to control and access your computer from anywhere by simply sending a twitter-message with a special command as its content.

It works like this. You first install the free TweetMyPC utility on any Windows PC and associate your Twitter account. The app will silently monitor your Twitter stream every minute for any desktop commands and if it finds one, will act upon it immediately.

Before we get started, it may be a good thing if you can set up a new twitter account for remote controlling your desktop and also protect the status updates of this account to ensure better security.





Go to your new twitter account and In the setting page you will find a check box to protect your Tweets. Check it on.





Now Download TweetMyPc from here . Install it in your computer and associate your Twitter and Gmail account with the application. It will use Twitter to receive remote commands (like shutdown, log-off, lock workstation, etc) from while the email account will be used for send your information (e.g., what process are currently running on your computer).





During this process it will ask to Sign in to your twitter account and you have to enter the PIN Number to complete the authorization.








Next to ensure the connectivity send a test tweet from TweetMyPc. If it is properly connected your tweet will appear in your timeline.








How to Send Commands to the Remote Computer

Now that your basic configuration is done, it's time to set up a posting method. You can use email, SMS, IM, web or any of the Twitter clients to send commands to the remote computer.


By Email: Associate you Twitter account with Posterous (auto-post) and all email messages sent to twitter@posterous.com will therefore become commands for the remote computer. (Also see: Post to Twitter via Email)


By SMS: If you live in US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, Sweden or New Zeleand, you can send associate Twitter with your mobile phone (see list of numbers) and then control your remote computer via SMS Text Messages.


By IM: Add the Twitter bot - twitter@twitter.com - to your list of Google Talk buddies and you can then send commands via instant message.


By Web: If you are on vacation but have access to an internet connected laptop, just log into the Twitter website and issue commands (e.g., shutdown or logoff) just as another tweet.


When ever you want to shutdown , restart or logoff your PC. Just login to your Twitter account and post a new Tweet: Shutdown / Restart / Logoff.

To know more supported commands for TweetMyPC click here .

Similar utility TweetMyMac is also available for MAC users.

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