Help Is Just an Internet Connection Away Working with the Windows Remote Assistance Feature Joseph Moran
In the third and final installment in our remote access series, we'll be taking a look at the Windows Remote Assistance feature, a handy way to get help with system problems from any friend, relative, or associate with an Internet-connected Windows PC. Remote Assistance will let others see your Windows desktop — and if you decide to allow it, control it as well — to help troubleshoot and solve technical problems.
Receiving or providing technical help via Remote Assistance can be more efficient than doing it in person and much more effective than trying to muddle through issues with someone over the phone. Using Remote Assistance won't always be feasible (it won't do much good if your system doesn't have Internet access, for example), but in most cases it's a useful tool for resolving general operating system and application problems, or even certain hardware issues as well.
Remote Assistance works a lot like the Remote Desktop feature we discussed two weeks ago, but it's not limited to specific versions of Windows — you'll find Remote Assistance in all versions of both XP and Vista. One caveat is that it's not always possible to successfully establish a Remote Assistance connection when either party — but especially the person requesting help — accesses the Internet through a router that uses NAT (Network Address Translation).
Of course, pretty much everyone connects to the Internet via NAT routers these days, but the good news is that as long as the router in question also supports Universal Plug and Play (UpnP), it should work fine with Remote Assistance. (UPnP allows a Remote Assistance to work through NAT by automatically opening the right TCP/IP ports and making sure the connection makes its way through to the correct PC.)
For the greatest likelihood of success with Remote Assistance, the router of each party should support UPnP. Most routers purchased over the past several years do, but if yours doesn't you may be able to add UPnP support by upgrading to the latest firmware. Depending on the connection method (we'll outline those in a moment), one party having a UPnP-compatible router may be all you need to get Remote Assistance to work, but if neither party's router does UPnP, you probably won't be able to use Remote Assistance.
Getting Started
Before you can use start using Remote Assistance, you need to make sure it's enabled on your system. In Windows XP, click Start, then right-click My Computer, click Properties and then select the Remote tab. Make sure there's a check next to Allow Remote Assistance invitations to be sent from this computer.
Next click the Advanced button and also make sure there's a check next to Allow this computer to be controlled remotely. This will give you the option of allowing the person helping you to control as well as view your desktop. Below that, you can (and should) change the amount of time that invitations remain open from the default 30 days to something much shorter, like one day. You can also set it to be as brief as a few hours or even minutes.
To enable Remote Assistance in Windows Vista, click Start, right-click Computer, click Properties, and then select the Remote Settings link under Tasks in the upper left. From there the procedure is much like it is in XP, except that when you click the Advanced button you'll notice that by default invitations will only remain open for six hours and you have the option to specify that only those with Windows Vista or later will be able to respond to your invitations.
