You can use this FREE program to see your screen from a remote location, even via a modem connection.
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
"VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing 'desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures."

Lots of HOWTOs have been written for Linux, but....
note that most of the typical settings you need for linux, like firewalls, LAN setups, connections sharing and such are now done via the GUI and a click of the mouse in Mandrake.
http://www.ibiblio.org/mdw/HOWTO/HOW...EX/howtos.html

Some places to get good information are
http://www.mandrakeuser.org
http://www.mandrakeforum.com
and you can type in a question to a sort of AI interface at
http://www.mandrakeexpert.com

And linux users find FREE programs in "RPM" format (like a "ZIP" file), and it's a easy install.
http://rpmfind.net/

Isn't it about time to switch to Linux?