Family & Computers

So in keeping with the holiday season I'm writing tonight about family, in particular the family members with little to no computer skills. I'm sure almost everyone has received the frantic call/email for "HELP!" at some point, some of us unfortunately receive it more often than others. You know the calls, "My icons are all big and funny", "I can't find anything", "why's my computer so slow", how do I install well...anything" or the infamous "some box popped up what do I do?".  At first I attempted to answer these by phone with detailed explanations on the hows and whys. It soon became apparent that my thoughtful and informative answers were going in one ear and straight out the other, this of course led me to the inevitable decline into binge drinking. So with serious protests being issued from my liver I searched for a more peaceful solution to those life altering computer questions and lo and behold I discovered a most wonderful program, "Team Viewer" http://teamviewer.com/index.aspx 

This is an awesome remote desktop program for both business and personal use, and it is free for personal use on up to three computers. This program does it all, you can control unattended computers, file transfers including .exe, uses secure data channels with key exchange and AES session encoding, works behind firewalls, and has browser based access. As an additional bonus, it's very easy to set up on the other end, all I did was send my mom the application via email, had her copy and paste it to her desktop and within minutes I was into her system and fixing the problems. A quick word of advice, send the family member into another room immediately after logging in, this avoids the phone call to tell you their mouse is moving all on its own and thus starts another round of the "why?" questions.

So my suggestion for keeping the peace this holiday season is - visit their site, download the program and get on with your life, trust me, your family and your liver will thank you for it!