I have a lot of people that ask me to fix their computers. Usually it is "slow computer" or "my computer has pop-ups," etc. In other words they have viruses and spyware. I thought I could use a remote program to do it, instead of them brining their computer to me or me traveling to their house..
I thought of UltraVNC, though I'm not sure how I would get them to use it. What I would like to have is a program they can download from my website.
What program would you recommend for this? Remote Desktop? VNC? Something else? I'm happy to pay a small fee if necessary to make things as seamless as possible. Word of mouth is valuable and a good referral for an easy to work with computer person (me) is worth that monthly or one time fee.
I have Vista, most will have Vista Home Premium or XP Home. I have Vista Home Premium and Mac OS X. I can use Linux if necessary. I just don't have it installed right now.
Thanks.
EDIT: Is there an alternative to copilot? I like it but I'm afraid to stake everything on one provider.
https://www.copilot.com/
It's made to be simple so even the most novice computer users can figure it out.
Copilot helps you fix someone's computer problems by letting you connect to their computer, see what they see, and control their mouse and keyboard to help fix the issue.
It's nice because they just go to the site and enter the code you give them. The installation is simple from there.
(Modified)
LogMeIn has a free version that works very well. It runs in the user's system tray and you can login and control their computer as long as they have the program running. The free version has a few less features, but they're mostly luxuries instead of necessities.
Team Viewer is a desktop sharing remote control support tool. It is free for non-commercial, personal use.
There are a few different options:
Remote Desktop: Nice interface, integrates with Windows very well (I had no trouble connecting to my Vista desktop from my XP laptop). I think your client would need to have Windows XP pro; XP home does not have the Remote Desktop Server.
RealVNC: Nice interface, the free version is very useful. Encrypted connections are available with the non-free version.
There are others (like Copilot), but I have only used Remote Desktop and RealVNC.
With either of these, you need to make sure port-forwarding is setup if they have a router, and that the firewall whitelists the program.
Windows XP has built-in "Windows Assist" which lets you send an invite to another Windows machine (typically via e-mail) and allows you to remotely control the machine with them watching. This is a nice option because it is already built into Windows (albeit not as well known as RemoteDesktop or LogMeIn).
The advantage over Remote Desktop is that the user can see what you are doing to their machine and control can be passed back and forth.
This link has the steps to do this.
Related
I have a requirement of getting the details of all the clients installed software. I have published successfully but when I try running in the client machine it is showing the server details only. How to overcome this problem?
A web browser does not have access to the client operating system. That would be a terrible security problem.
You should consider using software that is made to do this sort of thing. Don't reinvent the wheel.
Most especially, wheels on a sailing ship aren't much good. That's what you're trying to do here.
I have the problem since yesterday. When I'm logged on the computer hamachi works OK, I have the connection in my network. But after I lock the computer I cannot have the connection to it. Suddenly after I log to the computer it connects again.
Can somebody help me with that issue? I tried a lot, the hamachi system service works ok, I even reinstalled the software...
There was a change in the licensing. Basically they decided their product was too useful and cool for people not to pay for it. The change in the licensing reads:
unless a computer is part of a paid network, you need to be logged in
and running the Hamachi UI on your desktop in order to allow it to
function
Basically this closed free access to using Hamachi to log onto unattended computers, but allowed casual users (like gamers) to continue using it for free.
Notice about changes in the licensing can be found at: Changes to Hamachi on November 19th (archive); some people got really pissed off at the change. The change seems fair to me, but it's a pity they're no longer free to access unattended computers. I haven't been on the hunt for a free alternative yet. In a discussion at superuser, someone recommended NeoRouter, but I haven't tested it yet; seems like a good option though.
I want to ship a piece of hardware to clients that they plug in to their network via Ethernet or USB. This device contains an ASP.NET web application that they access via a web browser on any PC in their network.
This needs to be a small device that costs less than $500, meaning it can't be a full server with a Win2008 server license. This would be repeated hundreds or thousands of times - once for each new customer.
Are there external hard drives or NAS devices that can run as an IIS/ASP.NET web server?
Thanks,
Roger
If you stick with a PC setup, you might be able to use a desktop OS and IIS Express. It should support everything you want, you might even be able to get this on a cheap netbook.
I'm sure you could build a small PC based an an embedded motherboard, or even a mini-itx board. But, this is a programming Q&A site and not really the place to ask about building servers.
If you're looking into keeping it cheap I would highly recommend looking into Mono which is free and runs ASP.Net very well. If you have any Windows-specific things you'd need to possibly change those but hopefully you wouldn't have those on a website.
You should look into converting your app to Mono.Net running on a virtualized environment. The OS and the runtime environment would be open source and would allow you to freely distribute it.
Mono.Net
Virutal Box - VM Enviornment
Ubuntu Linux OS
Buy a netbook with windows 7 home premium on it as that bundles IIS7. If you need any more "capacity", then you should look at bigger hardware anyway.
I realise that there are many existing questions regarding this issue, but I haven't found any that discuss specifically shortcut keys, usability etc.
Can people please give me good/bad feedback on using the above development tools on the 15" MBP (2010), with regards to the following:
Shortcut keys in VS - how do they perform running in a VM, does os x interfere etc?
(one example being F10 and F11 for stepping through code)
Lack of dedicated delete and # key - does this create a frustrating dev environment?
" and # switched on keyboard - too frustrating when doing storedprocs etc?
any other things I've missed relating to ussability of the above
I don't particularly want to use bootcamp, as I might as well just not have a Mac then.
This is all to decide whether to have a MBP as my main machine for personal + professional use.
I have a 2009 MacBook and I have Virtual Box setup on it with Windows 7, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL 2008 with Management Studio. I use this not for my main development machine, but rather if I need to quickly look at something and already have the MacBook out and on.
For proper development I have a separate Windows 7 machine which is obviously much more powerful than running a virtual machine on top of OS X. Using the MacBook is OK, but you couldn't use it day in day out for serious development.
Over the years I've tried Parallels, VMWare Fusion and Virtual Box and overall performance and functionality doesn't vary hugely in the real world. The main difference here is that Virtual Box is free.
As to the keyboard differences, under System Preferences you can opt to have the function keys act as regular F keys which solves that issue, and then using something like DoubleCommand you can remap the other keys that are giving you trouble.
See this SuperUser question about it:
MacBook Pro Keyboard - How to Swap / Remap Keys?
I used a 2008 MBP 17" with Visual Studio...
You kinda have to either plug in a pc keyboard or live with the macbook keypad really...
I was in the same position as yourself, I didn't want to install Bootcamp unless I really had to.
Turns out some software called PARALLELS allowed me to install windows vista in a VM environment whilst logged into OSX, it literally feels like Windows is running in its own window, although you can have full screen of course.
Performance turned out to be great, parallels will setup the networking too so you can still access the Internet from your VM environment.
http://www.parallels.com/uk/products/desktop/
Edit: I should make it clear that if you are serious about .NET development then it would be much much better to actually get a PC with Windows running natively - with things like parallels you cant obviously devote all resources to the virtual OS.
As .NET is a strong part of my career I no longer use the mac, I have PC with Windows 7 installed now. It really does depend on how you define 'professional' use of visual studio... it can be done on the mac however!
I have a late 2009 13" MBP with only 2GB of memory running VS2008/SQL Server 2008. I used Bootcamp as I don't see what the big deal is - the install was a snap and Apple has released 2 updates to address compatibility issues.
The speed is good, not great, and I've been putting off going to 4GB of memory, but most definitely workable.
The function keys work for debugging. The most annoying thing to get used to is the fn key at the bottom left, as I'm really used to having the control key there. There are keyboard equivalents to delete, pg up, pg dwn, etc...
Also annoying is the keyboard backlite. The only way I found to disable it is to kill the Bootcamp process, sleep and wake.
Not sure what you mean by # and " switched on the keyboard, as I've been using shift+2 and the " two keys right of l.
I've built some fairly large web apps using VS and I'm happy with the MacBook as I use it to build iPhone apps as well, so I need a Mac. It's also nice to have 2 OSes. You can't get a Windows machine to run both Windows and OS X as easily as you can get a Mac to run OS X and Windows.
Also, not keyboard related, but design related. Apple, IMHO, put aesthetics over usability in making the edges of the body so sharp. When you lean your wrists on the keyboard, the edges dig in and after leaning on them after awhile, you have pretty deep dent marks. I've seen videos where people actually file down the edges (I think I saw that the MacBook was still powered on in one video. Ouch.)
As a heads up, I have some experience programming on Windows and other devices, but I have almost zero experience doing web anything, so I'm sure this is simple/easy to find online and I just don't know what I'm doing.
I have a computer on my home network that is connected to the internet(I can VNC into it from online if that helps) and I want to set it up so that I can connect to this PC online and access a web page stored on the PC.
This will be used by two people tops, so I'm not concerned about the number of connections or that kind of thing, I just want to be able to look at this page from online. I'm not sure what to call this, but I guess I want to have own webpage on my home PC that I can access to do stuff remotely.
Basically, I want to be able to go to http://{my-pc-ip}/webpage.html and see it online. If it helps, this is largely a learning exercise for me, I want to experiment and play around with what I can do through a webpage on my home network, through an online web page interface. Like maybe start a program on my home machine using a button the page, but do this from a computer connected over the Internet(this stuff I'll figure out myself, I just don't know how to set up the online stuff).
this is quite simple. You can use either IIS which is shipped with your XP Pro or use free and open source solutions:
XAMPP - http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html. I've been using this for years. Very simple. The last step of installation is just to secure MySQL and FTP (if needed at all). PHP is shipped so you can start doing web development without extra hassle.
Lighttpd - http://www.lighttpd.net/. Another FOSS webserver, which is very light-weight.
There are a few more but Apache is the most popular so you can just go ahead with XAMPP which is very mature and has large community of users.
Lastly, remember to relax your firewall allow access to your IP address from LAN & VNC (whatever you needed). Some materials to get things done:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/security/winfirewall.mspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875357
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb877979.aspx
http://members.shaw.ca/nicholas.fong/vnc/
Enjoy doing web!
Not really programming related, but none-the-less, WAMP is by far the easiest solution out there.
http://www.wampserver.com/en/
To expose your PC as a web server you need to do couple of steps:
Have external ip (static).
Configure the firewall to allow incomming connection to your PC to port 80 (if you need SSL then port 443 too).
Set up a web server: you can use IIS (if WinXP is not Home edition), Apache server or smallest possible HTTP server like ihttpd.
Put the pages into your root directory.
That is the basic explanation of the steps to do.
For basic house-holding tasks like temporarily sharing static files on a lan i have used HFS which is only 600K, has a gui, adds itself to the explorer context menu, and yes, it is free with source code available.