When you need help, you might be adept but out of your field or a complete duffer. Still, you can install tools and invite friends to help you, let them navigate you through the twists and turns. Even the easy tools can be a little intimidating but you know, if you are in a situation where you need help then unless someone is on-hand you are going to waste a lot of time and money when you could be making it easy for someone to assist you.

If someone is your friend its likely they don’t want to drive over just to walk you through something that might turn out to be basic. On the other hand if they are a computer junkie they might be more than happy to work with you by seeing your screen. You share what you can see, and even give control over the mouse and keyboard as if they were sitting there with you. Of course, if you found this blog … 1) I’ve sent it to you because you are someone I’m trying to assist myself, 2) You already know what remote support is and you searched for “choosing + remote support” and are looking for tools.

Some of the tools want to give you way more than you need, charge you for a huge subscription fee and harass you forever until you cancel the account. Others are freeware/shareware or free to trial. I feel that it’s always best to start with free/share/trial-ware because if you develop this habit you might accumulate vast savings and end up saving more than money, but a lot of trouble subscribing, fixing out of date accounts or just dealing with crappy changes designed to charge you for a product you paid for already. Remote support technology has existed for many years and for it to earn your payment it has to be very slick and useful in some way that you don’t need.

I actually only started using Teamviewer recently because I’d known about it but I was fine using VNC or logmein. There you go – top 3 in one sentance

VNC – which stands for virtual network computing is an old protocol. It has been implemented by different programmer/developer groups. I recommend TightVNC if you understand IP addresses and networks but if you want something with stronger security just check out other options like the older VNC product RealVNC

Teamviewer – if you have a client that doesn’t understand those things and you need to find them and connect. In the early days I avoided it because people got hacked through it too often so I just didn’t like the whole smell of that. Its been years – now its Teamviewer 14 software – it seems to have decent security features after all those years of issues.

Logmein – if you want to build a whole console of tools and computers this one might be for you but beware the charges really start to build up. I would say its not worth the price they put on it, but the price is set because it does work and work well. Especially deploying links to users who don’t know much what to do.