i have three computers in my house two desktops one laptop and they are all connected to are netgear router the remote desktop works through are computers but when i go to my friends house 4 doors away it says it cant find my computer and i know i type the computer's name down right i think it's the router thats blocking it like a firewall would but i am not sure i need some feedback on how to fix this problem i will greatly appreiciate it thank you

Ok, when you are on your home network, you can connect to your other computers by name. But, outside of your network, those names are not valid. Here is what you need to do: First off, your router is the ONLY connection to the internet from your home computers. You have to go through your router to get to your computers. You will need to find the external ip address of your router. The internal IP address is usually 192.168.0.1 (or something similar) - that is not what you want. You can usually find the external IP address by logging in to the router's admin. In my case in the admin tehre is a Status tab where the IP address is listed. This number can change from time to time, so you might have to look it up occasionally. Now when you want to connect to one of your computers at home from outside your home network you will need to connect by IP and use your router's external IP. But that's not all. Your router is not a computer so if you try to remote desktop to your router - it will fail. Remote Desktop runs through port 3389. So, you need to forward port 3389 from your router to the computer you will connect to. This is done in the router's admin. Usually in the Advanced section and is also referred to Virtual Server. You will forward port 3389 to the internal IP address of one of your home computers. If you use DHCP see if your router has a way of assigning a static IP, otherwise your internal IP address may change. If not, you can manually configure the IP address of the computer that will be connected to. The one problem is that you can ONLY forward a port to ONE computer. So, if you are outside your home you can only connect to one of the computer (the one which the port is forwarded to) directly. In my situation I have 4 PCs in my home. One is a dedicated file server that is on 24/7. I have port 3389 forwarded to that computer. Once I remote desktop to that computer, I then remote desktop from that computer to any of the other three PCs in the house. It actually works very well! Hope this all helps. If not post back with any specific problems or questions. Michael J

Very nice answer Michael, you probably already know this but you can change the port that remote desktop listens on. You could probably make each computer a different port then when trying to get to them from the outside world you just put :(port number) behind the ip address. Here and here are the MS pages that tell how to do so.