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Copilot is free on weekends.

https://www.copilot.com/

I second TeamViewer or Copilot.

VNC works, but is a royal PITA to use with a naive user on the other end. It helps that most of my family support is done on the weekends, when it's free to use Copilot. It was a lifesaver when my daughter was in Europe last semester...

https://www.copilot.com/

* Remote desktop and VPN are your best friends. Learn them, live them, love them.

I'd like to point out Teamviewer for quick, minimal-setup user assistance. It's come in handy a couple times for me and work acceptably even halfway around the world. I believe they charge for corporate users.

There are quite a few options nowadays to meet this sort of need. Fog Creek Copilot is Joel Spolsky's entry into this space.

How is it that nobody here has yet mentioned Fog Creek Copilot?
https://www.copilot.com/
It sounds like exactly what the op is looking for. They even have free day-passes every weekend.

Normally I use Windows Remote Assistance. Get them to go to Start->Help and Support.

Last I knew, CoPilot was free on weekends too, which should make it a good option for helping family and friends.

If you're willing to spend some money for easy client deployment, you could have a look at co-pilot. They have monthly plans for $24/user, or $0.25/minute if you don't want the whole shebang.

Copilot is free on weekends. http://www.copilot.com/ I've used it and it works pretty well, and it's about as easy to set up as possible. The hardest part is talking a clueless relative through the process of downloading something AND THEN FINDING IT and then launching it.

Okay seems like everyone and their brother has a different idea and since this interests me I tried to roll up as many of the interesting looking ones as possible into one posting :-) Did I miss any?

http://www.teamviewer.com/

https://secure.logmein.com/products/free/

http://www.copilot.com/

http://skype.com/

http://www.uvnc.com/addons/singleclick.html (reverse VNC)

http://www.crossloop.com/

http://www.mikogo.com/en/

http://showmypc.com/

https://www.ntrconnect.com/

http://www.zolved.com/remote_control

http://www.wippien.com/ (VPN)

http://code.google.com/p/gitso/ (reverse VNC)

Everyone's favorite Joel has an okay solution. Its very user friendly and doesn't require router configs. It's free on weekends. It is based on VNC so it's slow but it gets the job done. I used it to fall back to a restore point on my mom's Windows laptop across EVDO.

https://www.copilot.com/

Copilot (from Joel of Joel on Software fame) just works. I give my family a code, they type it into the website and download and run the .exe.

If you like, they can hang on to that .exe file and reuse it next time (so long as you also keep your corresponding helper .exe).

It's free at weekends; the rest of the time it's very cheap (and pay-as-you-go, so no monthly subscription - you just pay for the minutes you use).

I use CoPilot.com as they claim it works from anywhere. Other solutions will only work under the right conditions. (ie, their network is configured correctly, your network is configured correctly, you're not working from a hotel or airport, they are not at starbucks, etc...)

That's because if CoPilot can't setup a direct connection between the 2 computers it can route the traffic through their computers.

CoPilot

Different pricing models (Day Pass, per month), free on weekends.

Because Wine is faster for a lot of things. An example I encounter all the time at work: Sometimes I need to use copilot or similar tools to access a user's machine and screw around with whatever. It only runs on Windows and OSX, though. Now, I could open a VM, wait a few minutes for my virtual XP install to boot, and run the program from there, or I could just run the damn thing under wine in three seconds. In addition, I now have the ability to cut and paste between that application and my desktop, whereas you don't always get that in a VM. (I'm aware of VMtools but it seems to not want to install sometimes and I have no idea why.)

So unless you're proposing I leave a VM running all the time, which I think is a silly and needless waste of computing power, Wine is still my choice for running some Windows program quickly. It also handles accelerated graphics fairly well, and my VMs don't.

I guess that was a good troll, because it made it to +5, but it seems kind of weak to me.

One product? Offhand, I can name three separate products which FogCreek ships.

Doubly so because you're comparing it to AutoDesk, which has ... well, there's AutoCAD. I don't know any others. According to the Wikipedia, the first non-AutoCAD product of mention is Revit, which they bought in 2002, after the company was 20 years old.

FogCreek is only 8 years old. Even AutoDesk wasn't paying $133 million for other companies when they were only 8 years old.

I'm not seeing anything particularly useful in "The Autodesk File". Could you point out what parts of it might be of use to us budding CEOs? I like the parts about how they're stocking up on 8" floppy disks and looking at porting to C for the 8086 and 68000. It's a regular blast from the past, but I don't see anything here that's very useful in building my own company.

How do I obtain the Fog Creek Copilot source code under the GPL? The client software used in Fog Creek Copilot is built off of a VNC core. VNC is protected under the General Public License (GPL). You may obtain a copy of the Fog Creek Copilot service for Windows source code from https://www.copilot.com/copilot_helper_src.zip, and a copy of the Mac source code from https://www.copilot.com/copilot_mac_src.zip. top

How do I obtain the Fog Creek Copilot source code under the GPL? The client software used in Fog Creek Copilot is built off of a VNC core. VNC is protected under the General Public License (GPL). You may obtain a copy of the Fog Creek Copilot service for Windows source code from https://www.copilot.com/copilot_helper_src.zip, and a copy of the Mac source code from https://www.copilot.com/copilot_mac_src.zip. top

Yes _that_ Joel.

https://www.copilot.com/

Why not just use CoPilot. If I can talk my technophobic cousin through installing it over the phone, any one can use it.

https://www.copilot.com/ from those fog creek losers does exactly the same thing. they say they allow you to download their VNC modifications... but just try compiling them .... you can't

Ah, another piece of commercial, proprietary software derived from VNC.

Here's a serious question: has Fog Creek ever given anything back to the open source community?

Ah, another piece of commercial, proprietary software derived from VNC.

Ah, another piece of commercial, proprietary software derived from VNC.

https://www.copilot.com/press/faq/

Here's a serious question: has Fog Creek ever given anything back to the open source community?

It's best to not have any software firewalls on a PC used by someone elderly - from my experience, it's easy for the elderly person to click the wrong button after a Firefox/Thunderbird update and cut off their email. Instead, just use a broadband router with a reliable firewall, and disable all use of Internet Explorer or Outlook, and make sure Windows auto-updates are turned on. Or get them using Linux if you can - one relative, now 80, started using PCs a long time ago when Linux wasn't an option, so she took the DOS/Windows route, but if I was starting an elderly person on the Internet today I would use something like Kubuntu or MEPIS (now Ubuntu based).

Another key issue is setting up remote access unless you live a few minutes away - absolutely key to do this, yet the shortage of IPv4 addresses makes this annoyingly hard to do when both sides are behind a NAT router. It's almost worth getting IPv6 on both sites just to simplify this, though it would take some setting up.

For those stuck with NAT, try Fog Creek Copilot - https://www.copilot.com/ - not perfect, and requires access codes, but is relatively simple to get working. The downside of this is that you have to keep downloading new executables when buying a day-pass, which is the most error-prone part of the whole setup.

Don't like Copilot, eh?
While not a fan of their Copilot software, it is available though GPL.

https://www.copilot.com/faq/#28

If you don't like it, do something about it, you have the code.

copilot seems pretty neat. it's built on VNC but uses an SSL server as a reflector, so there's never likely to be firewall issues.

What the is it that you expect the average NAT user to be doing that matters with the "end to end paradigm of the internet"?

Voice-over-IP, Mobile IP, IPSEC, VNC, gaming...

And then there's the fact that polling and/or bouncing all your traffic off proxy servers (which is what you have to do in order to do anything except HTTP in a NAT encironment) is a terrible waste of network resources: ISPs (especially ones with defaultless routing tables) don't want NAT.

And then there's the fact that writing any sort of new software takes 3 times longer and requires a monthly subscription (or adware) to what is essentially a big centralized error-prone proxy server in order to support NAT: Developers don't want NAT.

People who are about reliability and security also don't want NAT, for much the same reasons.

In the end, end users end up paying more for NAT, even if they're too ignorant to see why.

(An interesting case study is the relatively expensive Copilot service, which offers nothing except VNC-over-NAT via a centralized proxy. Every one of their customers could have easily used VNC for free if it weren't for NAT making things complicated.)

I've had the same one, however I had just talked the guy through doing it once before and even got him to copy the icon to the desktop so it was nice and obvious for next time.

http://www.copilot.com/ is a service for doing this on Windows - uses VNC and some magic.

Although their server-side proxy software isn't available, the source code to their "client" (which is based on the VNC client and server) is available under the terms of the GPL.

Although their server-side proxy software isn't available, the source code to their "client" (which is based on the VNC client and server) is available under the terms of the GPL.

It looks like VNC on the client, and some proprietary code on their server so that rather than have VNC listen, it connects to their server which acts as a matchmaker. The advantage being that it can get through firewalls, since most of them don't block outgoing connections on port 443.

https://www.copilot.com/tech/

The Fog Creek Copilot service allows people to help their friends, relatives, and customers fix their computer problems by connecting to their computers via the Internet.

Unlike other remote assistance services, Fog Creek Copilot is secure, easy to use, works through virtually all home or office firewalls, and requires no installation or configuration.
Learn more...

The Fog Creek Copilot service allows people to help their friends, relatives, and customers fix their computer problems by connecting to their computers via the Internet.

Unlike other remote assistance services, Fog Creek Copilot is secure, easy to use, works through virtually all home or office firewalls, and requires no installation or configuration.
Learn more...

At least VNC viewer portion seems to be under GPL. They have the source code up for download in the FAQ

https://www.copilot.com/faq/#28

But the vnc viewer portion doesn't seem to actually compile in Visual Studio 6. Complains about missing files (SessionDialog.cpp, LoginAuthDialog.cpp, ConnectingDialog.cpp, Daemon.cpp, AuthDialog.cpp, ClientConnectionFile.cpp, and atlenc.h for me). Can anyone get it to compile?

I wonder how many of us have been threatened with lawsuits by our educational institutions because of Internet activities? Or by individuals?

I personally was threatened with criminal and civil action by the University of Kansas back in 1995 because of a website on a school computer. It was very hard for me, as a 19 year-old, to take. I was scared.

The second time I was threatened with civil action was by a student's lawyer-dad and I was scared.

The third time I was threatened with civil action was from a competitor with a lawyer-sister. By that point, I wasn't scared any more.

Kind of like meeting the police. They scared the shit out of me the first few times. Last time they came to my door was 97 and I didn't let them in. All I said, standing in my door, was "I'm not going to talk to you" over and over and over again, as the guy got more and more pissed off. He went away, just like the losers threatening civil suits.

I think a lot of dealing with lawyers and police is standing your ground and saying nothing.

In the case of this Utah fiasco, I think any lawyer will be able to get him his degree, but since his site was on a uni network and server, he's kind of out of luck. As I learned from Kansas, any state funded school is going to be really protective of their servers and network, because once a website is even remotely publically funded, a lot of people have asses to cover if a webpage served says something un-pc.

It's probably time for him to cut his losses, and walk away, fighting only for his degree. (free speech aside because there is no free speech when you're borrowing a soapbox)