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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Vista Tip: Offer Remote Assistance

I while ago I complained about how Remote Assistance is an awesome feature in Windows XP, but that I wished for a way to offer some one remote assistance. You see, every time I need to use Remote Assistance to fix something on my parents computer, I often spend 5 minutes explaining to them (again) how to go into Messenger and invite me to fix their computer. It's PAINFUL. Anyway, I wrote about this, and was messing around with Vista today and found a new menu item in the Actions menu called Offer Remote Assistance.

THANK YOU WHOEVER DID THIS!

You've saved me countless minutes!

Update: here is how you access this feature.

  1. open a conversation window
  2. go to the action menu
  3. select offer remote assistance

 

Thursday, December 07, 2006 6:42:40 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Actually the "offer remote assistance" option is in XP as well, it's just really well hidden, if you go to the Help and Support page, click the last item under tasks, Use Tools to view your computer information and diagnose problems. On my work PC the second "tool" listed in the eft sidebar is "offer remote assistance". Why the option is there as opposed to the remote assistance area is beyond me.
Saturday, December 09, 2006 8:14:58 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Omar, I too support my parents PC from about 1,000 miles away, and now they have a batch file that they run so they can tell me what ip they have today, and I just hit it direct with account/security, they will never remember XP's or Vista's "Offer Remote Assistance" and they can't navigate messenger, that would even be worse. Trying to keep it simple for them and me!
Cheers!
Wednesday, December 13, 2006 2:45:34 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Windows XP Home remote assistance seemed pretty bugridden when I tried to use it. I ended up using TightVNC to help my father with his computer. He lives about 1000 miles away, so it saved us a lot of expense. It worked great, http://www.tightvnc.com/
Ray
Friday, January 26, 2007 3:53:35 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
With XP you can offer unsolicited remove assistance by creating an shortcut to the following.
It is all one string but is getting wrapped in my display.

hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,C=US/Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/unsolicited/unsolicitedrcui.htm

The target machine must have a Group policy set that allows it to respond to unsolicited offers of help.
It is all explained in the following article
How to use the "Offer Remote Assistance" policy setting
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308013


Kevin Burney
Monday, November 05, 2007 6:16:44 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
tert
wellington
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