InstantHouseCall Free Version is awesome for family support.
Check out http://www.instanthousecall.com and install their free Remote Support tool. It really is awesome and saved my ass yesterday when I needed to connect to a remote Vista machine on the fly and my Single Click Vnc just wasn’t doing it! What do you guys use for remote support? We would love to hear your favorites in the comments.
June 2, 2009 - 7:06 am
Teamviewer (portable) and AMMYY Admin for me.
AMMYY Admin installs as a windows service (if required) and is 100% free.
Teamviewer offers by far the best in terms of ‘ease of use’, speed and quality in the trade but is restricted to ‘free for personal use’.
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June 2, 2009 - 8:34 am
Teamviewer. I find it clean and useable and it gets the job done.
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June 2, 2009 - 9:14 am
I also use Teamviewer. For people who I support on a more frequent basis, I usually prefer LogMeIn, as it doesn’t require user interaction at all to connect to them.
For business clients, sometimes I use Crossloop, though not nearly as nice as the methods above.
Thanks for the heads up on InstantHouseCall (and AMMYY, had never heard of ‘em. I’ll give them a shot.
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:32 am
Are there options to reconnect after reboot or ways to manage the uac on teamviewer or crossloop?
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Shon Reply:
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Teamviewer is the first choice for me because it is cross platform, and about 50% of the people I help are on Mac.
Teamviewer does have the ability to install as a service, from there features page:
“TeamViewer can also be used to control unattended computers and servers. Installation as a system service even allows remote reboot and reconnect.”
and it had full UAC support.
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Georges K. Reply:
June 4th, 2009 at 6:59 am
Karl for overriding UAC, as Shon mentioned, TeamViewer would work well. Also, when installed as a service, the advantage of TeamViewer is that is actually also has a VPN tunnel that you can start, so, it’s a little bit a combination of Hamachi + LogMeIn bundled together, that could be convenient.
One thing I noticed with TeamViewer, (at least when running on a Mac, is that it sometimes tend to freeze the workstation, or cause some erratic video behavior (i.e local, and remote mouse cursor in different places, keyboard gets stuck in “special character mode”, or space no longer works or something like this. easily fixable by restarting TeamViewer.)
Though TeamViewer is a bit faster to connect to while installed as a service, I still find LogMeIn to be a much more reliable remote control software, and IMHO, I think it has many more features, and control, even in its free version. a huge plus for that one also, is that you have an iPhone app that allows you to log in to all your LogMeIn connected workstations/servers. Lifesaver for me, and it works like a charm :)
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June 2, 2009 - 10:50 am
A big thank you from the small team here at Instant Housecall! And I’m glad to hear that you’re enjoying Instant Housecall and I hope you keep using it again and again!
We offer two versions — a free edition for personal use, and a business edition loaded with features.
You can use the FREE edition by clicking on this link: http://www.FreeRemoteSupport.com
And you can try the business edition for free by clicking here: http://www.instanthousecall.com.
Both work beautifully with Windows 7 and Vista, and you can even click UAC ‘Accept’ or ‘Deny’ prompts remotely.
Thanks Karl, for the kind words. And to all of you AtA readers out there, thanks for your fantastic feedback! Keep it coming!
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:32 am
That little tidbit “you can even click UAC ‘Accept’ or ‘Deny’ prompts remotely” is what seriously saved my ass! Good looking out Corey! i owe ya one. :)
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June 2, 2009 - 9:45 pm
ShowMyPC.com seems to work pretty good for me.
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June 4, 2009 - 6:40 am
I use LogmeIn , TeamViewer and RAdmin.
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Nate Reply:
July 18th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
I use LogMeIn too. The people that I use to help are too computer illiterate to download a program every time they need help so I just installed it on his (grandfather) computer so I can help him remotely
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June 10, 2009 - 5:34 am
Radmin is the best of all!
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June 27, 2009 - 12:26 am
No admin I, but I did run ab usiness for years that involved installing and configuring software on people’s machines. A trip to their site, or express them a CD, ask them to stick it in the drive and run CoPilot https://www.copilot.com/
Free on weekends, various otherr subscription plans. Get a call from the user at 6 am complaining the software wasn’t working or their boss b=needed them to tweak some reports parameter .. priceless. Problem solved from my desk three states away before my coffee got cold.
CoPilot ‘installs’ from just a link in an email you send the client machine and bang, you are connected. I won bets with several different client’s admins who said, you can’t use that here, our network is locked down tight. I highly recommend it.
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