Computer remote access comes in very handy when you need to control your home PC from work and viceversa. It's also a fast, efficient way to help a friend - or even your customers - with software installation and configuration. But remote control apps are usually difficult to use and hog system resources.

Well, not anymore: now LogMeIn makes remote control easier than ever by providing you a simple, fast and free tool to access your PC from anywhere. Just download the client and create an account on their website, and you're ready to go.

The client should be installed and launched in the computers you want to access remotely. Then all you need to do is start your session in the LogMeIn webpage and you'll have immediate access to your computer. You'll be able to manage files, transfer data from the local machine to the remote machine and viceversa (only during the first 30 days, though) and even control the desktop and mouse in the remote PC, with a surprisingly quick response to mouse movements. You can create various users with different privileges or open your remote session temporarily to a guest user, so that he or she can see what you're doing on the PC.

On the downside, image resolution is obviously not very high when remote controlling (forget about viewing photos in the remote PC). Also, the Java-based file manager looks a bit sloppy but that's probably due to Java itself. In all, I think LogMeIn is one of the best free remote control apps I've tried.