Colorado State University

This how to is designed to show users how they can connect to their office computer from home. At the time of this writing these directions will only work if the office computer on campus is a Windows computer. These directions also assume the following:

• – Power.  You cannot work from home if the power is out.
• – You have a Cable or DSL Internet connection at home.  Dial up will not provide adequate bandwidth for this to be useful.
• – Your office computer is running Microsoft Windows XP or newer. (Please though, don’t tell me you are still running Windows XP!?)
• – Your office computer is left ‘On’ when you are not in the office and that it does not go into ‘Standby’ or ‘Hibernation’ after a specific amount of time.

If the above checks out, then you will need to know what the IP address is of your office computer.  To get this, simply browse to the following web site from your office computer and write down the IP Address:

http://whatismyip.org

You will also need to turn on Remote Desktop on your office computer.  Follow these directions for your version of Windows:

Windows XP – Do not use this online…

Now that you have the IP address and remote desktop is turned on, you have everything you need to connect to your computer from home!

So, when you get home, let’s now set up the CSU Secure connection.  Here are directions for that:

https://cnsit.colostate.edu/kb/csu-vpn-duo

Once you are connected, you will need to launch the built in Windows Remote Desktop Connection client.  You can find this by searching for “Remote Desktop”.

When you launch Remote Desktop Connection client, you will see a window with a text box asking for “Computer:” – this is where you will paste in the IP address you discovered earlier.  Once entered, click “Connect” and you should see a window that looks like your office computer login screen.  Here, you just login with the credentials for your office computer, just like you would if you were sitting at it physically.