I need to set up a camera in a lab so it can be viewed from home. Do the pictures have to be transmitted to a website & then viwed or can the home computer connect directly to the lab computer and see whats going on? Will I nedd remote software such as Laplink? or can windows dial-up networking do it? Thanks in advance for your help

Assuming that your lab has a permanent connection to the Internet, the best program to use is a standard shareware/freeware Web cam program. This simply uploads pictures at user-defined intervals to a Website. Usually this is for others to see and the picture is integrated into a webpage, but this doesn't have to be the case. If you know the filename of the picture you can simply type it into your browser's address line and then look at the picture whenever you want to.
You could use Laplink but it's awfully complicated.