How to access your desktop remotely if you have an Linksys firewall/access point

If you are a home user looking to be able to gain access to your PC remotely from anywhere on the internet I’m going to outline the steps below.
So first things first you need to have Windows XP professional at least. If you have XP home then you’re not going to be able to enable remote desktop by default. You will have to use a program like UltraVNC.
First things first you’re going to have to enable NAT on your firewall. By default the IP of a Linksys home router is going to be 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 I’m sure there are others but these will be the most common. So first thing you need to do is open a web browser to this IP address. From here you will be able to manage your router.
You will need to look for a tab that says something like applications and gaming. From here look for a setting that says “Port Range Forward”. Or something like this. This is where you configure NAT(network address translation) or PAT(port address translation).
You’re going to need to know the IP address of your home machine which can be found by going to start menu>run and typing in CMD then when the black DOS box comes up type in ipconfig. This will display your IP address.

(Click on the picture for the entire thing)
You can see from my attached photo I have configured a few ports on my firewall. The important ones are RDP(this is the built in Windows remote desktop) and secondly the VNC one. I actually use this for remote support for my clients. However, it could be used to also run a VNC server so that you can connect back.

You can also see from the image above, accessed by right clicking on my computer and going to properties. That you must enable remote desktop on your Windows XP machine.
The last step here is to open a web browser to http://www.WhatIsMyIP.com. This is your “public” IP address as the rest of the internet knows your computer. Now you should be able to successfully go to another PC anywhere on the internet and do a start>run>mstsc. This will popup remote desktop application. Then simply type in your public IP address.
Windows terminal server is an easy, cheap, efficient way to access your PC from anywhere.