Anything better than VNC for OSX?

June 25, 2009 12:55 AM

UltraVNC on Vista connecting to OSX is very very slow - is there anything faster?

I'm connecting a fast Vista box (i7) to a Mac Mini (intel something) via 100mbit ethernet using UltraVNC.

However many things are very slow - dragging windows around, minimizing windows, etc - around 1-2 FPS.

Is there anything faster? I'm used to RDP on windows, which is a different protocol I know, which is blazing fast.

Forwarding X sucks - I need the full desktop. NX doesn't appear to exist for OSX.

Are there any options, or am I stuck with VNC?

posted by jimjam to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I use VineServer (free) on OsX and TightVNC on Windows. They work reasonably, except some key mappings. Probably something to do with Japanese keyboard though.
posted by lundman at 1:01 AM on June 25

I've never tried LogMeIn for home use, only for lab (office) setups, but it might help you out.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:41 AM on June 25

If you're not opposed for any partcular reason, LogMeIn for Mac works wonderfully and it's free if you want.
posted by tcv at 4:44 AM on June 25

Your connection options are limited to VNC and X forwarding, unfortunately.

If you had another mac you could use screen sharing, which is Apple's proprietary VNC service. That works pretty well.

If you are connecting from windows, you can try different VNC server client combination to find one that works well. I suspect you will continue to be unimpressed with performance however - the mac mini is (IMO) underpowered.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 5:25 AM on June 25

I use TeamViewer. Free for non-commercial use.

It would probably help if you found out how to disable all the fancy effects on Mac OS since the fades and genie effects and general snazziness of the interface takes aaaages on a remote connection.
posted by BrokenEnglish at 5:45 AM on June 25

If you're using Apple's VNC server, it's often not very fast unless you use an OS X client. I'd try Vine Server/OSXvnc, I think it supports more encoding types and might be faster. Also, if you can live with it, drop your bit depth down to 16 bits - it's half as much data to encode/decode.

Still, RDC on Windows is one of the few things MS has gotten really, really right - VNC will never be on quite the same level, but you should be able to get it up to at least tolerable.
posted by agentmunroe at 5:49 AM on June 25

Oh, BrokenEnglish reminds me: try and keep relatively few windows open and set your background to a flat color - it often gives a slight speed boost to VNC since it can just send a rectangular block and not waste time/bandwidth on encoding your desktop background.
posted by agentmunroe at 5:51 AM on June 25