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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Sunday, July 03, 2005

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Remote Assitance

To be honest, the main reason I switched my parents from Mac to a PC many years back was the built in Remote Assistance. I can't tell you how many times this has saved my parents a plane ticket to fly me home. I probably use it twice a month. However, there are two big problems with Remote Assistance.

1) MSN Messenger needs a way for me to Offer Remote Assistance. Each time I need to help my parents I spend about 10 minutes telling them how they need to ask me for Remote Assistance. That involves launching MSN Messenger (to which they say, I'm already using MSN), finding my contact, opening it up, going to the Actions menu, Start Activity, then Ask for Remote Assistance. For the love of Pete give me a way to offer them Remote Assistance.

2) Why oh why can't Windows XP stop drawing pretty things when I'm connected. It's freaking slow as molasses as I sit there and wait for all the animations, drop shadows and pretty colors to draw. I wish it could down sample the UI like Remote Desktop can. This would save me a lot of time.

I wish some one would fix this.

Software
Posted Monday, July 04, 2005    Permalink    Comments [9]  View blog reactions

Tracked by:
"Microsoft Remote Assistance" (ericappel.net) [Trackback]

 

Sunday, July 03, 2005 6:26:20 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Oh and lest we forget... IT DOESN'T WORK THROUGH NAT!
Josh Einstein
Monday, July 04, 2005 10:58:57 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
It does if you have UPnP routers on both ends (which I do) :-)
Omar Shahine
Monday, July 04, 2005 2:46:42 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Or, you could upgrade them to XP Pro... problem solved.
Richard Tallent
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 1:35:46 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
What about unsolicited Remote Assistance. Once you enable it on your parents computer it should work. http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308013
Ming Ma
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 9:28:25 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
You could probably setup my webex which offers RDP for 5 computers, FREE!!You dont need to worry about Natting as it is an Active X control
Abdul-Aziz Rajgoli
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 1:33:35 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
#2 is odd.. when I tested outlook 2000 (I think that's the version it was, at least) on the first version of terminal server one of the very specific things we looked for was any animations for search/etc, to make sure they didn't run when on TS. I'm surprised windows doesn't have that too... although I guess XP came out only a year later, so maybe it was a more recent thing?
KC Lemson
Saturday, July 09, 2005 2:57:01 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
LogMeIn.com

/nuff said
Some Clown
Saturday, July 23, 2005 6:47:48 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
That's a Very Bad Idea. Lots of people just click on "yes" anytime a window pops up. I'm sure it'd be trivial to write code that spammed MSN Messenger offers of assistance, then immediately turned that box into a zombie (or installed adware or whatever).
dan
Monday, October 03, 2005 12:33:42 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
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dbx reader
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