I couldn’t afford to use these remote access companies like logmein and gotomypc. I had to find a solution to access my home pc or my wife’s pc when she was on the road. It had to be a reliable solution that wouldn’t cost me a monthly fee. A little trick I used, setup a rule in your Outlook Express so that when you send an email to your machine it will respond. I used ‘home ip’ in the subject. When I needed to get into my machine from the office, I’d send an email and it would respond with a default message. Now I had the IP of the machine which you can find by looking at the Properties->Details->Message Source.
Now it gets tricky because I’m behind a router. So the remote access port had to be forwarded to my machine also. If your router is setup for remote access, you can access the router and forward the port. Great, now you can get in to the remote machine (if it’s setup to allow for remote access).
That was one way I was able to get in. Another, you can get a free account from one of the DDNS (dynamic domain name service) companies. Then you use their client to run on the remote machine and it will keep a unique name updated with the IP.
I have complete instructions located at Lukeup.com.