HOWTO... Access your PC remotely from any other PC

What you need: Dwservice software; Windows 10 or 11 Time required: One hour

There’s no shortage of ways to make sure you can access your files everywhere, but your options will have restrictions if you stick to a free account. Dropbox ( www.dropbox.com) starts you off with just 2GB of free storage, while a free Box account ( www. box.com) limits you to files smaller than 250MB. This may be fine for documents, but what about movies and backups?

Mega ( https://mega.io) doesn’t limit file sizes and gives free users a very generous 20GB of storage, but it might restrict your data-transfer speed, depending on how busy the service is. One way to overcome these problems is to run your own online-storage service.

WD’S My Cloud range of external hard drives connect to your home network and are accessible over the web, so you can open your files from anywhere in the world. They’re keenly priced, too. You can pick up a 3TB My Cloud drive for a little under £150 ( www.snipca. com/40142), which strikes us as pretty good value for money.

But we’re also fans of do-it-yourself tech, and making savings where we can. So, here we’ll show you how to make not only your files but your entire computer accessible over the internet – for free. You can use your main computer or, if you have an old one lying around, reuse it for this specific task. If it’s a desktop computer, you could even unplug the monitor, keyboard and mouse once it’s up and running, and put it somewhere out of the way, such as under a desk.

All you need to do is install Dwservice, which is a powerful, free and reliable remote-access program. It’s based in Estonia (one of the most digitally advanced countries in Europe), though all its instructions are in plain English.