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Over the years, I’ve run into several situations where I needed remote access to a computer. Before I found a solution I can remember frustrating conversations with my parents, who live about 3 hours away. They’d call because they were having a computer problem and I’d listen to what was happening and try to walk them through solutions. Many times the problem wouldn’t get resolved and we’d all be frustrated because of the difficulty of trying to troubleshoot without being able to see the problem.

Thanks to some excellent companies who provide free remote access software I can now log into their computer, see their desktop and remotely control their computer to quickly resolve the problem. If you’re concerned about security, both programs I recommend use a secure connection and authentication so you never have to worry about someone else logging in.

I’ve found two different situations requiring remote desktop control and the perfect piece of free software for each. The first is when you want to remotely access a computer when nobody is on the other end. Maybe you need to access a file or your email on your home computer from work or while on vacation. I’ve remotely accessed my home PC on more than one occasion and emailed myself a file I needed. I also work with a couple computers at church that I sometimes need to access from home.

For situations like these the perfect free solution is LogMeIn.com. The process is simple. From the computer you want to remotely access, go to LogMeIn.com and on the home page click the link to Download LogMeIn Free. Fill out the short signup form, download the software and install it on the PC. Once that’s done you can remotely access that computer from anywhere as long as it’s turned on. From any other computer just go to LogMeIn.com, log in to your account and very quickly you’ll have full remote access to that computer.

The other situation is when a friend or relative calls and wants you to help them with a computer problem. In these situations you probably haven’t had the opportunity to install LogMeIn on their computer and quite possibly they wouldn’t want you to be able to access it at any time anyway. As long as their computer has internet access and they can take a couple minutes to get their PC ready there’s an excellent free solution for this type of situation as well. TeamViewer is a fairly new program but I’ve used it several times and really like it.

Have the person needing help go to TeamViewer.com and from the home page click the Start Customer Module link. When they click the link they’ll get the option to either Run or Save the file. They can just click Run. The file is a little under 1MB so, on a broadband connection, it should only take a couple seconds to download and install. Once installed, the program will present a window with an ID and a Password. They’ll need to give you both of these in order for you to connect to them.

At this point you’ll also want to go to TeamViewer.com and click the Start Full Version link. This will download and install a program that’s just a little over 1MB. Once it’s running, it’ll allow you to enter the ID and Password the person on the other end gave you and, within seconds, you’ll have full remote access to their computer desktop.

Please keep in mind that the free versions of these programs are for personal use only, but if you want to use them for business purposes, both companies sell a commercial version.

Thank you to both LogMeIn.com and TeamViewer.com for providing free software that has made remote computer access simple and made frustrating troubleshooting phone calls a thing of the past!

Regards,

-Bert

LogMeIn Tutorial:

 

In a recent article I wrote about the importance of protecting your computer from viruses, trojans and other forms of malware. Once a computer gets infected like attracts like and you can quickly find our PC so badly infected that getting back to a clean state will either be a time consuming or costly experience.

When it comes to our computer security there is no silver bullet. There’s not a single product on the market that can detect or clean 100% of the known malware.

Most antivirus programs use a database of signatures to identify malware. ThreatFire, on the other hand, looks at the behavior of the programs on your PC and effectively identifies the malicious ones and stops them in their tracks. With the number of new threats increasing daily using a behavior based anti-malware is essential to catch the ones your antivirus program doesn’t have definitions for yet.

There are a lot of things I really like about ThreatFire. It literally takes about one minute to install, the default settings are more than adequate to stop the bad guys, updates are installed automatically, and it has a very small footprint so you won’t even know it’s there until you need it.

Although ThreatFire does an excellent job of stopping malware from installing on your PC it shouldn’t be used to clean up an infected computer, nor should it be your only line of defense. Using a firewall and having a definition based antivirus program running will do well to round out your PC security. See my Computer Security article for suggestions.

WARNING: Since publishing this article I’ve installed ThreatFire on 4 PCs with Windows XP Home edition and in every case it caused the PC to lock up continuously. All of the PCs had to be restarted several times and the problem was only resolved by uninstalling ThreatFire. I tested ThreatFire on Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista and didn’t run into any problems. I reported the problem to the ThreatFire developers but haven’t gotten a response from them.

I won’t be loading ThreatFire on any more computers until I’m satisfied the issue has been fixed and I can only suggest that you do the same.

I’m currently evaluating the new version of AVG and will give it a review soon. If you’re currently using AVG and have been told you need to upgrade, getting to the free version can be a little tricky. Use this link to save some time & confusion: Download AVG Antivirus.

Happy Computing!

-Bert

For a long time about your only option for easily taking screen-shots was to buy Snag-It. Although I’ve seen some folks who are very good at using the Windows built in PrtSc and Paint I find that too cumbersome for the average computer user. I’ve been a Snag-It fan for years but at $40 per license and 4 computers in the house it’s hard to justify it. I think most people would only have an occasional need for such a program so once again, why spend $40 if there are other options?

Today, I was working on our new laptop and needed to take a screen-shot so I went looking for a free alternative on Download.com. After reading a bunch of reviews I decided to try ScreenHunter 5 Free. It’s a small application at 3.5MB so it was a quick download and install. The only part of the installation I changed was to NOT install the browser toolbar. If I installed the toolbar for every program that asked to install one I’d probably have about a dozen toolbars taking up space and resources so I normally skip that part.

One thing I noticed about ScreenHunter 5 is that on Download.com it didn’t say anything about it being compatible with Vista. I’m using Vista Home Premium and didn’t have any problems with the install or using the application.

Like Snag-It, ScreenHunter 5 gives you some options. By pressing the From button you can choose what key should be pressed to trigger a screen-shot being taken (the default is F6). You can also choose what to capture, the active window, full screen or a rectangular area. My favorite is the rectangular area because I can capture anything I want, anywhere on the screen. (The screen-shots below were taken using ScreenHunter 5)

By pressing the To button you can choose to save the captured image to the clipboard, which is great for just pasting the screen-shot into an email or a Word doc. Or you can automatically save them as a file.

Overall ScreenHuner 5 is super simple to use and I highly recommend it.

Regards,

-Bert