Thursday, November 02, 2006

Windows XP Find: Remote Assistance

Today I spent a bunch of time using Windows XP Remote Assistance. This is more or less the same concept as the VNC hack I previously blogged about. With Remote Assistance you get a view into, and control of, someone else's desktop. Great for tech support, debugging remote issues and for doing distance-based-pair-programming. And the best part? It's built in and easy to use.

Why didn't anyone tell me that Windows XP came with something this useful?!

To get started, just click on the Remote Assistance item on the Start Menu:

This will walk you through the process of sending an invite to someone to have them help you. The resulting e-mail contains a small binary of some kind that people click on to start a remote session.

No more asking people to painful describe every detail about the contents of their screen to me, just to realize they are running Explorer, not Internet Explorer.

Thanks Alex and Heather for teaching me about this one.

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