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Question from Brett P.: I recently bought a gaming PC and it performs awesomely well on my favorite games.
My problem is I travel frequently for work and I can’t take the gaming machine with me.
I also have a Dell Latitude business notebook that’s supplied by my company that I use when I’m on the road.
I know this laptop is capable of running my games but I’m not allowed to install them on it (company rules).
Do you think I can use TeamViewer to remotely play games on the desktop back at home over the Internet using the laptop in a hotel room?
Rick’s answer: You can certainly do that Brett, but I’m afraid you’d be extremely disappointed in the performance of the games.
The primary limiting factor in a setup like that would be the Internet connection. To have anything resembling a decent gaming experience you’d need a minimum of 1Gbps end-to-end connection speeds, and I seriously doubt you’d ever be able to swing that.
If you’re lucky enough to have a Gigabit fiber connection to your home, the chances of having an equally fast connection in your hotel room are likely to be quite slim indeed. My own personal experience has been that the Internet connections in even the best hotels are typically pretty poor.
What’s more, even if you had flawless Gigabit connections on both ends you’d still have some amount of latency in between, resulting in a considerable amount of lag.
As you can see, the chances of you being able to enjoy a successful gaming session via TeamViewer are, well…remote.
Bottom line: It won’t hurt a thing to try your luck at remote gaming in the manner you described above, but I seriously doubt if it’ll come anywhere near meeting your expectations.
Bonus tip: If your travels ever require you to borrow a computer you can easily use your very own USB flash drive-based web browser with your own personal bookmarks and browser settings.
Read this post to learn how.
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