Remote Assistance

Pardon me if this has been asked, but I did not come across it in my search.

I run XP Professional on my laptop and my parents have XP Home on theirs.

Has anyone used successfully the remote assistance feature? I tried it when I was home, and it seemed extremely slow, and I was unable to really do anything on the other computer.

I was hoping to use this feature from my place in Philadelphia if my parents were having a computer issue here in Buffalo. We both have cable internet service and sometimes it is very difficult to help when they are trying to describe the problem in words. It would just be easier if they allowed me control of their desktop and I could show them what to do.

Will use of the internet connection firewall interfere? Despite it being on, it did allow me to connect-- however, the wallpaper disappeared. I could not move the mouse on the other computer, and it seemed to take forever for the other person's desktop to show on my screen.

One other thing-- my parents' computer is connected to the internet through a Netgear Wireless router. The computer is connected to the router by cable, but when I was using the remote feature, I was connected wirelessly.

My computer in Philadelphia is connected to the internet with a wire, not wirelessly.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to hearing any solutions!

fuzz

I have successfully used this feature a lot and for the same reason. My mother has gotten quite good at clicking the little Remote Assistance icon!
Unfortunatly, they are on dialup so it is beyond miserable.

I suspect your disapointing proformace was related to upload speeds. Even though some cable companys have speeds as high as 3mbs their upload speeds are aften still locked at 250kbs. DSL carriers are often worse.
Because your folks are transmitting their desktop (via RPC) back to you, it is using their uplink portion of their connection and is thus limited. Likewise, your comannds (mouse movements, clicks) are going out through your uplink.

The fact that they are using a route and you were wireless shouldnt matter at all.

The windows firewall- overkill if you are behind a router with NAT- shouldn't matter much either other than it has some processor and memory overhead.

you might try TightVNC, althought its not as pretty and often not any faster.

-N

If you care to go to the trouble of getting them upgraded to XP Pro, then Remote Desktop Connection (RDC), which is a part of XP Pro, is a far better choice. Any client with the RDC client software installed (it's in XP, and free for 98, etc.) can remotely control an XP Pro machine and it only transmits neccessary mouse and keystrokes, resulting in far better/faster control.

RDC is one-way connection -- from you to the remote host only. It's not interactive and that's why it's faster. You would need to be on the phone with them, explaining things... and then you would be done sooner too.

See here: MS RDC in XP

RDC and Remote Assistance are the exact same technology. RA is included with both home and pro but RDC is only in pro. The benifit of RDC is that you can control YOUR computer remotly. However, it locks the terminal (the monitor back home) so it wouldnt be much good for interactivly fixing your parents problems b/c they wont be able to see your screen while you do.

What is the best way to get back to a computer behind a router? I use no-ip to get my ip address, but what is then the ip address, and or domain to access?

The DHCP address? With a static address, 192.XXX behind the FW or router,
thanks

Look into gotomypc. It's not free, heck, it's not even inexpensive, but it performs flawlessly, both behind routers and firewalls.

I would not be inclined to use gotomypc.com. I think the free options are just is good if not better.

If you have XP pro, use the affore mentioned remote desktop. On your router open port 3389 and forward it to the computer with remote desktop enabled.
There are two IPs involved here, the WAN and LAN. WAN = wide area network and is the IP address you get from your connection (ISP). It is usually provided to your cable or DSL modem via a protocal called DHCP (dynamic host control protocal?). I'm not farmilliar with no-ip, but it sounds like a way to determine this address. It is, for all intents, your address to the ouside world. Its the address on your front door.
Behind the router you have LAN address, (local area network). These represent individual computers. If the WAN is your street addres, these would be rooms in your house (not visable to the outside world, but you can open a window from time to time).

If you don't have XP Pro, google for Tight VNC. Its a similar solution. you run a small server program on your home PC, open the right port (not sure what it is) and then have a client on the remote PC that you use to connect.

In all cases, from outside of your rotuer (the rest of the world) you use the WAN IP address.

Hope that is more clear than it feels like to me right now.... typed in a hurry.

I'm good with all that, I guess I don't know if WAN:LAN is the confirugraion for address. For example, the computer name is the WAN? IP? or the WAN:LAN ip, or hte LAN ip.

I only have this problem sometimes when going over a router.

As for ports, I always use the 3398 port, not the 3389? Is this a type, or are they both suffiecient?

I could have sworn it was 3389, but I could be wrong. I didn't look at my router before typing my message.

The address is simply the WAN IP. The way to specify which computer behind the router that you wish to access is done at the router. For that reason, you can only access one computer from the outside world. My work-around for that is to remote desktop into the one computer that is open to the outside then go from there to the other computers.

So when you are using the remote desktop client or the VNC client from outside of your rotuer, you use the WAN IP.

I have always opened up 3398, which is what I have now, but maybe 3389 works too.

MSFT says 3398, AND 3389

I'd recommend VNC (in any variation, tight, original, etc) over RDC.

The full blown version is available at http://www.realvnc.com/. It has as it's advantage, over RDC, that you access the real, live desktop on the remote machine, and you can seamelessely start or end a connection to that real desktop.

RDC gets you to a second desktop, so you and your parents can be both logged onto the same machine, but each of you is hidden from the other. With VNC, you can watch exactly what the remote user is doing (because you see his desktop), and since you can also control the mouse and keys, he sees you move the mouse, click, etc.

Look in the FAQ for how to get to a client (you) to server (your parents) connection through a router, if your parents use one.

no-ip.com doesn't tell you what your IP is (you can use whatismyip.com for that if you need to).

What it does is allows you to have a site, call it

flyertalk.hopto.org

A little app runs on your machine so that every time it's started it registers it's IP address (if you use DSL or dial up your IP can change with each connect, or even during a session on my DSL, it sometimes restarts and reconnects at 12:30 every morning).

This way, if it's on say a laptop andn you travel with it, no matter what IP you are assigned in a hotel or whatever, people can reach you by going to flyertalk.hopto.org. It's free, and it's really cool.

Yeah, no ip will tell you what the ip of you machine is, if you run their free whats' my ip tool. Simply polls the ip, at either times or when it changes, and updates your no-ip IP address respectively. I just have to do a quick lookup and i'm back in businesss.

I have been trying for a few weeks to use remote assistance feature on my work or home computer.
Actually, You can use remote sharing from any computer if you install mstsc.exe in your windows/system32 folder.
But still I have not been able to get it to work successfully.

Have XP pro at home and use laptop (behind wireless router)
Any suggestions?

I found the problem on my folks router, was the port 3389 wasn't open. I guess I always had it open on mine so that is why it worked. And, the other firewalls we have used had it open.

once I opened that up, and knew the ip address, it worked fine.