You are living in the wrong college dorm :)

Teamviewer 3 http://www.teamviewer.com/ is also a very good tool for remote administration (for parents, grandparents, etc). It is very simple. It is free for personal use. Basically when your parents launch teamviewer, you connect to their servers (not sure which port, but I was able to do it from work therefore it was most likely 80 cause they have every port known to man blocked here), and they are given a 10 digit number and a 4 digit pin. Then, you yourself launch Team Viewer and you type in the 10 digit number and the 4 digit pin and voila, you see their desktop. Very easy because you do not have to setup any special port forwarding (if parents have firewall). I've used it several times and it is very slick.