One of the most annoying practice you can have is trying to fix someone's PC over the phone — you can spend hours explaining what they need to do, all the while feelings, "If only I was there . . .".
Maybe you can't be there, but Windows XP allows you to do the next best thing. Using technologies inherited from Windows 2000 and NT 4.0, it lets you invite a remote user to work with your PC as if they were right at the keyboard. Dubbed Remote Assistance (RA), it's a big leap forward from just talking people through something over the phone — now you can enact it for them as they watch, or fix problems from your end without having to go to their PC in person. It's also a way to allow someone else to show you how something work on your PC, or vice versa — again, without needing to bring them over to your house or office.
Invitation only
RA works by invitation: if you need help from your PC you send out an invitation, either by email or as a standalone file. The recipient of the invite runs the file to get access to the remote system and types a password (specified by the remote system owner). Then, up pops a remote copy of the other computer's desktop that behaves exactly like the real thing. The speed of the desktop depends on what kind of network connection you have, but it's functional even on a dialup link. Remote Assistance was built from the ground up to be relatively secure, so that it wouldn't be possible to use the system to remotely hijack someone's desktop against their will.
Enabling remote assistance
The first step in using Remote Assistance is to make sure the machine to be controlled is RA-enabled. Right-click on My Computer, select Properties, then click the Remote tab and check Allow Remote Assistance invitations to be sent from this computer (if you're reasonably sure that you're not going to use RA anytime soon, you can disable it. This not only disables the sending of RA invites, but prevents them from being activated at all).
To send an invitation from that machine, fire up Help and Support from the Start button, and click on Invite a friend to connect to your computer with Remote Assistance. If your buddy is available as a Windows Messenger contact, you can sign in and send the invitation that way. Alternatively— and more commonly — you can send the invitation by email, or save it as a file and send it separately. Once you choose the delivery method, fill in a name for the invite and a short message that describes the problem. The message itself is optional, but can be useful for filling in the other person ahead of time.
Next, pick an expiration period, which can be set in minutes, hours or days. This is how long the invitation is valid. After the designated time, the invitation is no longer valid on that computer. If you're sending out the invitation on a disk, set the timeout interval to a week or so; if it's by email, set it to several hours.
You can also choose to set a password for the remote session. Don't use the message field to tell the other person the password — make sure it's a password that both of you are aware of, such as your mother's maiden name. If you're using Outlook, once you elect to send the invitation, you could get a warning that another program is trying to send email. Click Yes to continue.
The invitation comes in the form of an email with an attachment, usually with the filename "rcBuddy.MsRcIncident". To connect to the other machine and start the Remote Assistance session, just launch the attachment. Provided the other machine is active, not firewalled (see below) and at the same IP address it used to create the attachment, you should be ready to go.
When the recipient activates the RA session, the sender of the invite gets a pop-up message: "[name of person] has accepted your Remote Assistance invitation. Do you want to let this person view your screen and chat with you?" Click Yes to continue. The remote desktop will then appear on the client's computer, and the machine being controlled will pop-up a control panel with a chat window. Both parties can type through this window, and if you both have speakers and microphones, you can also talk by clicking on the Start Talking button. You can send files back and forth with the Send File button.
Take control
For the remote user to take control of the machine, they need to click the Take Control button at the top of the Remote Assistance window, which will prompt the other user for permission. Once they click yes, the machine will be controlled through the remote user's mouse and keyboard as if it were the local machine.
If you're performing Remote Assistance through a dialup connection, bear in mind that it may be very slow. RA assumes that you're on a slow link by default and scales things back appropriately, but if you're on a high-speed link and want to take advantage of that, click the Settings button (on either console) and select "High-speed connection." Also, if the remote display is bigger than your local one, you can size it to fit by clicking the "Scale Window" button.
What can't you do in a Remote Assistance session that you could do on the local desktop? The answer is very little, but most of what you can't (or shouldn't do) depends on how much bandwidth you have. Don't try playing games or videos in RA, as the connection will never be able to keep up with it. Programs with complex graphic displays (like Photoshop, or a Web browser) will take a long time to synchronise on both ends. Whatever you do, keep it simple.
If the RA connection doesn't work, there are several possible reasons for this. One of the most common is when a person is using a dialup networking account and gets disconnected after they send the invite, but before the invite is used — their IP address will change and the invite is no longer any good. In such cases it might be best to try and send the invitation via an instant messenger, which could even be faster.
Also, be mindful of firewalls. The inbound connection (the machine being helped) has to have port 3389 open in both directions to allow a Remote Assistance session. Microsoft's own Internet Connection Firewall does not block port 3389, ostensibly so that RA can work through its own firewall.
