Free Remote Desktop For Win7-10, NOT Teamviewer... - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 03:00:26 am
content: WTF, I use Teamviewer for 10 hours, and it's eating up 390megabytes of ram and slowly continues to eat more. What kind of BS is this? Thanks to that, it's eating away at my poor laptop HD's swapfile.I disable my laptop's swap file and the computer runs like a desktop, except, if I have the teamviewer running, it crashes all my programs with the system running out of system memory error, except, there is still 2.5-3 gigabytes of unused system ram...I need a good public domain remote desktop viewer which supports background graphics & dragging windows unlike the one built into windows remote desktop which is slow and chunky.What are my options.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 03:31:49 am
content: Have you tried VNC or X2Go?

author: GigaJoe
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 03:32:52 am
content: quite mistake,all but embedded working with a videobuffer, basically transfer bitmap with multiply option to decrease traffic.embedded in opposite dictate what should be written on screen like GDI command, in extreme state dropping insignificant info like background bitmap, substitute font to local one , and so ...Open local RDP -> Show Options -> Experience , Uncheck boxes what you like, below: "allow the following:" - every unchecked do increase performance , response timedo check pesist bitmap , reconnectwhen connected info should indicate UDP enable, it does decrease latency as well

author: eti
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 03:40:02 am
content: TeamViewer. Yeah I know you didn’t want that, but it’s superb. What’s all this about 390MB swap files - what are you running, Windows 95? Just use it and move on. Life’s too short.

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 03:42:47 am
content: I have found one called Nomachine when I want to share someone's desktop for remote assistance.I think I read it is free if it is used for non commercial purposes:https://www.nomachine.comI'll give X2Go a try.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 03:57:23 am
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on June 29, 2021, 03:31:49 amVNC actually installs and serves on my laptop, but I need it on my main system where it demands a 'key' to install.Even after un-installing and re-installing, somehow my laptop is registered, but my main system will not allow installation. Where can I get keys for the old version 5.xx I use.(BTW, what's with the the other forum member commenters dummy comments about me wanting a compact viewer which doesn't hog HUNDREDS of MEGABYTES just to remote view a 8 megabyte display. When I used to have 2 functional registered version of VNC, they never ate up more than 20 megabytes, not 400...They were also faster than TeamViewer. Next, my desktop calculator will need 1 gigabyte with a 1tb HD swapfile, if not, I must be in the stone age. Teamviewer may be functional and server a purpose, this doesn't mean it isn't programmed like a piece of crap continuously eating away at system memory slowly but surely. If I leave it running for hours, it doe self die occasionally just from poor coding practices.)

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 04:01:57 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on June 29, 2021, 03:00:26 amSounds like a memory leak. The software isn't releasing memory blocks when it's finished using them and they accumulate the longer the program runs. It's the result of careless programming.I believe the easiest answer is to shut the program down which will automatically result in the memory being released. You should then be able to fire it up again ... where it will start sucking up memory once more. Rinse and repeat as often as necessary.The ideal would be to get the author to fix their code.Quote from: eti on June 29, 2021, 03:40:02 amDo you drive on flat tyres?It's a problem. Most people like to try and address problems once they've been identified.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 04:08:00 am
content: Yes, I keep teamviewer's viewer running for days at a time.Quitting and reopening doesn't help as certain actions can eat up a ton of memory fast.Yes, having a '16 gigabyte' swapfile helps alleviate the problem, but, leaving teamviewer running slows everything else down over time as my HD goes nuts with the swapfile access. It's like even though Teamviewer only allocates ~400 megabytes, it sort of demands that that portion must be going in and out of the swapfile continuously dragging down my system.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 04:08:46 am
content: So report the bug and don't worry too much about what is still a very small amount of RAM. If you don't want swapping, add more RAM and don't use swap at all.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 04:19:43 am
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on June 29, 2021, 03:31:49 amX2Go doesn't have a server for Windows, only a client for Windows.VNC, I need a pass code.Anything else?

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 04:24:48 am
content: Quote from: Monkeh on June 29, 2021, 04:08:46 amGood suggestion.With modern systems having multi GB memory, the swap file is not really necessary. It was only introduced when we were fighting with small RAM systems (remember when 32MB was absolutely awesome?!!) and programs that were bigger than that. The swap file was "virtual memory" and, as the name suggests, memory blocks were swapped in and out of RAM as needed.It is for this very reason that you should avoid using a swap file with SSDs. You will wear out an SSD alotfaster with a swap file.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 04:29:22 am
content: Quote from: Monkeh on June 29, 2021, 04:08:46 amI tried it on my 16gb system without a swapfile, it still does the same thing. The OS pops up a message my system is low on memory, you must close 'Teamviewer'. This happens about every hour or so, yet when the message pops up, I'm only using around 6GB of 16GB. How is this possible, I haven't even used 50% of my ram. When I turn on the swapfile, almost no problem, but, my system begins to use the swapfile at an enormous rate for no reason. It slows down my Quartus compiling and some web viewing when I have a lot of tabs open. Without the Teamviewer open with access to another desktop, no problems, no speed penalty.I think VNC was the best for compact with full background support and speed. I only need LAN support. It's too bad I cannot find my old version 4.x installs which didn't require any license.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 04:46:29 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on June 29, 2021, 04:29:22 amYou can take a look at the many open source VNC forks.If you just want great performance over LAN, maybe look into a cheap MJPEG hardware encoded solution?https://pikvm.org/https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot/I wonder if there are any open source remote desktop software that leverage the h.264 or h.265 encoder built into modern GPUs.

author: sandalcandal
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 04:49:42 am
content: People I know and I have used Chrome Remote Desktop to good effect. Simple, fast and it works. (I suspect some people here will dislike it because Google)https://remotedesktop.google.com/

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 04:55:05 am
content: I'm using RealVNC in my local network to connect from a laptop to my desktop (basically sitting in bad with laptop on my belly doing stuff on my desktop in another room)Not using the latest version, I think I'm using the version that was made before they made the bundle "vnc connect"That version had a freeware mode which disabled encryption but otherwise worked fine, but if you know where to search (cough cough torrents) you could find license keys / patches to disable online license check and enable everything.It's much more polished and smooth than TightVNC,I've also used TightVNC in the past, this one's open source, free, with a pay version that adds some acceleration, better video driver, and I think better encryption but i'm not sure ... it works fine.

author: GigaJoe
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 05:06:16 am
content: open task man, add check boxes for mem usage, look who really use it ..disable swap not recommended, you may decrease it starting with 100M, but it should be, some pages may not be in use it going to swap. basic for all OS behavouri'm still recommend to use integrated RDP with options ... best speed comparing to any third party

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 05:32:18 am
content: Quote from: GigaJoe on June 29, 2021, 05:06:16 amAnd if there's no swap it just stays resident in RAM. Nothing explodes, performance isn't impacted. More systems out there have no swap than do.

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 06:06:09 am
content: Quote from: Monkeh on June 29, 2021, 05:32:18 amAgreed.Once we started running systems with GB of RAM, the NEED for the swap file pretty much faded away. Yes, itwasnecessary to free up real memory when you had pages not in use, but that is a legacy of system limitations that are no longer applicable in ever increasing numbers.In other words, what you said, GigaJoe, was appropriate 20 years ago ... not so much today.

author: kripton2035
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 06:20:39 am
content: you can try anydesk, works fine for me althought I did not hunt for memory leaks...

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 06:35:11 am
content: My preferred option for remote desktop these days is Google Chrome Remote Desktop:https://remotedesktop.google.comI found it as an alternative when TeamViewer started kicking me off after 30 seconds of use (an attempt to force me into buying a license). This Chrome Remote Desktop does the same job as TeamViewer. It lets you connect to a remote PC over the internet and behind firewalls and supports file transfers between the machines. Unlike what the name would suggest it does not require the Chrome browser to work. Its a separate installable windows program that remebers your google login ID. Then any browser can visit this website, login using the same google account and remote desktop into the machine from inside the browser. Completely free and without limits and the setup is very simple as long as you already have a google account.But for remoting into local machine in the same LAN i just use ultraVNC (or on linux x11vnc) to create a free no bullshit VNC server on the remote machine. These classical VNC clients/servers are pretty fast and responsive on a fast local Ethernet connection. But it is not a good solution for remoting in over the internet as you need open ports to work and a rather fast internet connection to work well.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 06:39:41 am
content: That's just Firefox with two windows (dual monitor) each with around 10-15 tabs, that I use almost daily so I can't / don't want to close.Besides Firefox, there's a VPN connection to my work, an Adobe Acrobat reader opened, and a bittorrent client ...So 9 GB are currently used, out of 16 GB...What do you think would happen if I start a video game that uses more than 5-6 GB of memory and I had no swap file? Either the game would constantly hang to load stuff from drive because it can't cache everything in ram, or I'd get warnings from the operating system saying "some application will have to be closed to free memory" and I don't want random firefox processes to be killed for the game.Should I alter my workflow and my life just to disable page file? That's stupid.I have a page file that's set as fixed size (4 GB) on my SSD and a secondary (around 12 GB) on a mechanical drive. The 4 GB page file on the SSD is barely accessed, but should there ever be need for it, I know it's there and applications won't crash due to lack of memory.Also, from time to time I use a RAM drive to speed things up (generation of thumbnails, downloading a web site with lots of pages, indexing lots of text etc - stuff that requires lots of seeking and repeated read/writes works faster in a ram drive) and ram drives will lock portions of ram from applications, so having a page file helps not crash those applications when there's no available free ram.Yeah, you COULD not use a page file... but it's ridiculous and silly ... just let it be and use a page file.The argument that it hurts a SSD is stupid ... even a TLC drive with 100 TBW will last 5-10 years with 10+ GB writes a day to the page file ... in 5 years you'd probably buy 2-4 TB SSDs and laugh thinking you think you were worried about the 240-512 GB SSDs endurance.My boot drive is a 120 GB Sandisk using MLC memory... wrote 36 TB to it and the average erase count across the flash cells is 309 so there's still loads of life in it. ... MLC flash has around 5000 erases and TLC is down to around 1000-3000 .. seehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Distinction_between_NOR_and_NAND_flash

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 06:41:09 am
content: LOL, just for the fun of it, I just re-checked Teamviewer in task manager,it is up to 600megabytes.... And increasing...Maybe it's because I'm on a 1GB lan connection and TV just seems to soak up a crap load of data.The ASCII log size is also above a megabyte. A log. Of what? I only connect to 1 PC on my LAN.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 06:46:16 am
content: An my total across all my Firefox tabs is 600 megabytes too.1 remote desktop TV = 600mb, 8 firefox tabs =600mb total, everything else almost 300mb.My media player and other stuff going on totals ~300mb.Time to just pay for VNC and f-it.

author: gf
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 07:11:05 am
content: Why not use Window's native Remote Destop facility directly? The RDP client (mstsc.exe) is can be used generally, w/o restrictions. In Windows 10 Pro, the RDP server is disabled by default and just needs to be enabled. If you need to run the server on the Home edition, or if you need multiple RDP connections to a computer, then you can enable the server viaRDP Wrapperwhich is a free 3rd party program. It is supposed to work withvarious versions/buildsof Windows.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 07:42:31 am
content: Yep just use a SSD for a page file. You can get a 512GB SSD on the cheap these days.But but... i don't want to kill my SSD! Flash has limited write cycles! Yeah well... your PC is going to be obsolete before you wear the thing out. As part of a crypto mining adventure i ended up writing about 30TB per day to SSD storage and did this 24/7 for weeks. Even on a low endurance consumer grade SSD this still left plenty of life in it. So a page file is not going to wreck the drive that easily.Also i keep at least 16GB of memory in my machines(some are 32GB), so running out of RAM is never really a problem, even with Firefox gobbling up 5GB just for itself. Plenty of other small software uses up >100MB of memory for itself with no good reason. I hate seeing it in task manager but at the end of the day i don't really care because i never have issues with actually running out. RAM is not all that expensive so i just throw in a bunch of it. Its more of a problem if you hit the motherboards limit on how much RAM it can actually take.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 10:03:47 am
content: Quote from: gf on June 29, 2021, 07:11:05 amIn win7 it sucks crap. Slow, no window dragging with contents, I cant even effectively scroll an ascii text editor like notepad. No decent video speed.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 11:39:25 am
content: Windows has a built in RDP client for professional versions. It's the best one I've used. Beats Teamviewer by far. On Win10 it is nearly perfect.It seems like it takes the UI commands and replays them on the other end so it's not using much bandwidth even with a fairly active desktop and there are no compression artefacts. Compatible applications also stream compressed video over the network, so if you play a video in e.g. VLC, it appears near-realtime and decodes the video on the other end.About the worst thing about it is it doesn't handle audio well. So notification sounds and the like get garbled. Playing audio is fine apart from the first few seconds. I think it struggles with short playback as some applications keep the audio channel always active, so it has to determine what is worth streaming.

author: gf
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 01:01:25 pm
content: That's my feeling, too. Windows' RDP has evolved in the last years -- but Windows 7 is out of support for many years now, so it did of course not benefit from this development. On recent Windows Server and Windows 10 versions, I'd not be sure that any alternatives are really significantly faster than Windows' native RDP. On Windows Server, in conjunction with a supported server GPU, even GPU-accelerated RDP encoding is supported at the server side, AFAIK. But then we enter a different price category (and it's more relevant for multi-user systems where many users login to the same server concurrently via RDP).