Being in the Info Tech and helpdesk related field for for more than 8 years. The most annoying moment happen when a  user tries to get help and he/she isn’t familiar with how things work as simple as clicking on the Windows Start button or even what is right and left click of the mouse.

To solve these annoying moments, the Internet and remote assistance tools where invented to make life more easier for helpdesk tech to help those dumb users to troubleshoot problems (Well, before the Internet and wonderful GUI of Mac and Windows were around, there were text. Yeap, DOS and Unix. Remote assistance/administration those days were thru dial-up modem using telnet).

One of the few popular remote assistance tools were RealVNC which is free then, another one being PCAnywhere which isn’t free and Windows built-in Netmeeting. If the user is not behind a firewall, connecting to the user for remote assistance is as simple as getting the user to give you his/her WAN IP address via winipconfig tool or some other method which I do not want to elaborate and the helpdesk tech will get connected to the user’s desktop to help the user to troubleshoot problems.

But problem will arrives if the user is behind a router/firewall as the VNC, PCAnywhere or Netmeeting port need to forwarded on the firewall from WAN to the PC in order for the helpdesk tech to remotely access the user desktop. The fact that most of the users are dumb, they would not even have any idea on how to access their router or even where to configure a port forwarding.

Then there were remote assistance softwares like Logmein and Teamviewer which can bypass the unfriendly firewall to remotely access the user’s desktop.

However LogMeIn is only free for first 30 days and it’s more of a remote administration tool than a assistance tool.

Teamviewer produces a very good, free and fuss-free remote assistance tool, the free version does have a nag screen about suspicious commercial use if it’s being used very often. In the latest free version of Teamviewer, there seems to be a 5 minutes limit usage. After 5 minutes of remote assistance, Teamviewer will disconnect and the helpdesk tech will have to wait for 5 minutes before a connection can be established to the user for another 5 minutes before another disconnection and another 5 minutes of waiting. Waste of time, isn’t it?

So in my quest to search for a better alternative to RealVNC and Teamviewer, I came across Crossloop and I’m totally happy with it. It’s totally free, no nag screen, pass thru firewalls and best of all I can offer my troubleshooting expertise on Crossloop’s website to be a helper to earn some extra bucks. Isn’t that cool?!

If you need any help in troubleshooting your damn computer problem, click the button below this post to contact me

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Finally downgraded my Fujitsu U2010 netbook operating system from Windows Vista to Windows XP as Windows Vista performance is very sluggish with 1GB of RAM and Intel Atom processor.

Boot up time and launching of applications are much more faster now as before with Windows Vista. The boot up time from BIOS to Windows desktop  used to be about 3 minutes and now with Windows XP it take2s about 45 seconds. Launching Microsoft Outlook with Windows Vista used to take about a whole 5 minutes and now with Windows XP it takes only about 15 seconds (both OSes’ Microsoft Outlook with about 1.5GB of offline data file).

I have read on several websites that with Windows 7 loaded in the Fujitsu U2010 netbook, the performance is faster than both Windows XP and Vista. So now I’m patiently waiting for middle of July when Fujitsu will make Windows 7 available for existing Fujitsu U2010 netbook users.

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