Full computer address - Private Address - Remote Desktop Connection?

What you are looking to do is a very simple setup. But there are some caveats.

1 - You will need to assign a static internal IP to your computer (internal being the 172.24.97.x scheme)

2 - You will need/want a static IP assigned to your account by your ISP. Usually they will do this for a fee. You will want this so that when you connect to your machine remotely, the IP address you use doesn't have to change. If you do not ascertain a static IP, you will have to know your current ISP given IP address to connect.

To set up the usage of RDP, you must open port 3389 on your router and forward this to the internal IP address that you've assigned your computer. Some routers call this port forwarding, others call it NAT'ing. Both are the same. From here you will want to ascertain your current external IP address. You can do this by visiting http://www.getip.com/ It will show you the IP address assigned your modem by your ISP.

Once you have the proper NAT set up as well as your current external IP, you will need to make certain that your computer is set to allow remote connections. To do this, simply right click My Computer and choose Properties. Click the Remote tab and tick the box at the bottom that says "Allow users to connect remotely to this computer". Apply and OK and you should be all set.

I would suggest testing the ability to connect remotely to your machine from another on your LAN just to make certain all is well before trying it from an external source.

Cheers.

Your router has a public address on the outside and to tell what the IP address is, log onto the administrative page for the router and look to see what it's pulling down. Now, you're going to want to do this one of two ways. You can tell the router to listen on three different ports so when you RDP to your router's public address using a certain port, your router will know to which internal machine to forward that traffic to. For instance, your RDP to port 60000, forward to machine number one, port 60001, to machine number two, etc.

Your other option is a VPN. Once you've VPN'd to your home network, as long as your pulling an IP address in the same subnet as your other three computers or there's a route from the VPN subnet to the three computers' subnet, you'll be able to RDP directly to those machines.

For a security point of view, option two is better since the VPN tunnel will be (or can be) encrypted. I'm assuming you get a DHCP lease from your provider so to keep from always having to know what your public IP address is at home, you're going to want to you dynamic DNS from a service like http://www.dyndns.com/ That way you can VPN or RDP to the hostname.

you dont have to make a network to use remote desktop you just have to open the port up as you use the remote or you dont need it to share files either go to command promt run as an admin and then open then type in IPCONFIG but not in caps there you will see the ip address

wow, that is to much info.