Keep an Eye on Your Windows or Linux Computer Through Android Phone Using PC Monitor

by Asif Bokhari on August 6, 2011

If you are an Android device owner then must have thought about the possibility of controlling your Windows or Linux Computer through your Android Smartphone. Even you might have used LogMeIn Ignition to physically control your machine and observed that it gives very limited options.

Therefore if you want something which is better than LogMeIn and can actually bring you all the information that you need to know on the display of your smartphone without even having to take control of your actual machine then we suggest you to take a closer look at PC Monitor. The most important thing is, you can download it free of cost from Android Market.

In order to start using PC Monitor on your phone, you must first require to download a desktop client that enables the Android application to communicate with your computer. You can download the desktop version for windows (32 or 64-bit) or Linux.

Once you finish the downloading then you can start the installation procedure and setup your account with the service. If you don’t have an account, you will be asked to set a username and password which you will be used later on to set up the service on your phone.

You can setup following task on your desktop client software:-

You can select scheduled tasks, processes and services which are to be monitored.
You can view every single service that’s running on your machine by manually select them all. However, basic purpose is to monitor certain important services rather than everything.

Once you setup everything then all you need to do is to download PC Monitor from Android market which is available free of cost. As soon as you launch the app after the installation, you will be asked to login with the information that you just set up your desktop client. Enter the same Username and Password and you will be able to see the list of computers currently being monitored. You can control maximum 3 computer at a time for free.

you can see a system overview which will show you how much CPU is currently being used, how much free RAM you have available and your external IP address too. If you want some more detailed information then you can go down to the ‘System Details’ section of the app where you can see more hardware information such as temperatures and fan speeds of the computer, as well as all running processes and monitored services. From here, you can even see all of the information on your local hard disks and you can browse the file structure for any .log files that you want to send or interact with.

The application also enables you the facility to send commands from your phone to the desktop client remotely such as ‘Logoff’, ‘Restart’ and ‘Shut Down’. If also enables you to send your own commands to the computer and you can do so by opening the command prompt in the ‘System Details’ section of the app. You can type any command using the keyboard on your phone, and then PC Monitor will wait for a reply from the machine and display the contents on your screen.