Networking All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 4

Using Remote Assistance

In This Chapter

Enabling the Remote Assistance feature

Helping someone remotely

Working in the Remote Assistance window

One of the most annoying aspects of providing technical support for network users is that you often have to go to the user’s desk to see what’s going on with his or her computer. That’s annoying enough if the other user’s desk is across the room or down the hall, but it’s almost unworkable if the user you need to support is across town or in a different city or state altogether.

Fortunately, Windows includes a handy feature called Remote Assistance, which is designed to let you provide technical support to an end-user without going to the user’s location. With Remote Assistance, you can see the user’s screen in a window on your own screen, so you can watch what the user is doing. You can even take control when necessary to perform troubleshooting or corrective actions to help solve the user’s problems.

Note that there are commercial alternatives to Windows Remote Assistance that do a much better job at this task. This chapter shows you how to use Remote Assistance because it’s free and all Windows computers since Windows XP have ...