Hi and welcome to the forum,
There are several ways to do this, but it's usually done with a combination of routers, vpn's, and special software. If both of your laptops have Windows7 Professional (
there are 7 different flavors of Windows7; Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, Business Basic, Business Pro, and Enterprise), there is a built-in feature called
REMOTE DESKTOP built into the higher end Window7 Pro versions and up (mostly the business versions). You can download instructions for use from Microsoft.com website on this feature. It takes some work, and you'll have to temporarily disable
ALL of your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on
BOTH laptops as well as any Security Firewall programs or Microsoft Firewall settings to figure out how to make it work. This can also be a challenge on with some
ISP's (Internet Service Providers) as they intentionly block the
UDP/TCP ports needed for this type of traffic to pass outgoing/incoming into your Home Internet connection.
You can contact your ISP and ask them this question directly. Many of the larger ISPs in the US allow you to do this, but often you will have to make changes in your wifi router if your are using one, or if using someone like Charter or Time-Warner, they block the traffic in their Cable Modems which you as a Customer do not have access to.
They can make these changes for you...for a monthly fee!! Usually starts at about $9.99 US per month or more to do this.
I have set this up for business Customers, and it is quite problematic. Definitely not a 5 min. fix.
Other alternatives to all this Tekky mumbo-jumbo is to subscribe to an Internet software remote control software subscription service such as
GoToMyPC or
LOGMEIN. Both these services started out as free many years ago, and they really make it easy, even for non-technical people to accomplish what you are trying to do. But, now, both companies charge for this service. I have used and setup computers for multiple businesses using both, and they work great! and have many additional features that you haven't mentioned, such as Whiteboard Sharing, Collaborative Computing, and live Video windowing. GoToMyPC runs around
$189 US per year per each computer for this service. About
$378 for 2 computers such as you are asking about. Logmein just started charging for their service in 2014 and they are a little cheaper; about
$49 per each computer for year; works out to $108 US per year for 2 computers. I currently have this setup for my largest business Customer and it works great! I used to have about 50 customers on my Logmein list and I could remote into any of my customer's computers, even those who moved out of State for free! Alas, not any longer.
The deal here then is if you attempt to do this yourself, it's most likely going to cost you some money maybe $120 per year if you have an ISP who will allow the M$ remote desktop traffic to pass through their private network to/from your home and 2nd location. And a whole lot of Tekky know-how to actually make it work. If you use either of the 2 software services I mentioned you can do so for about the same amount--over $100 per year to almost $400 a year, but without having to learn advanced networking technologies and methods which takes
YEARS to learn.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>
