This is an experience my parents experience on a regular basis. Unfortunately, my father, who used to be very tech savvy - worked for Control Data for all of his career - is suffering from mild dementia and my mother doesn't know up from down on the computer. My father still loves to sit at his computer putzing around but too often gets sucked into some kind of infomercial / scam. As an additional example, we were recently charged over $1800 of overage fees when my dad kept backing up his entire harddrive to a cloud service not really knowing what he was doing.
It has gotten to the point where they really need me to assist them with all most everything related to managing their computers. Unfortunately I am 1000 miles away so we struggle on the phone to get things sorted out.
What recommendations do people have for being able to remotely manage windows machines. I am on windows 10 and they are still using w7. I'd like to be able to remote into their machine with admin rights so I can manage software, finances, etc.
TeamViewer. It's basically VNC, but with a middleman proxy so you don't need to do any hole punching, it has a single file executable "quick support" download, and random one-time passwords.
Somewhat ironically, it's also what scammers tend to use.
Windows Remote Assistance has been a built in feature since XP.
For security reasons the account you access in Remote Assistance is the account requesting help, and UAC prompts on the remote machine (anything on the "secure desktop") are not remoted, and have to be agreed to by the person you are assisting. However, if you have setup an Admin account on that machine, you can still use any RunAs tools of your choice/familiarity (runas.exe, Shift Right Click Run as User, PowerShell Start-Process -Credential) to escalate to your Admin account (so long as they don't need you to input your password on the "secure desktop").
VNC. Put a server on their computer and through a VPN you can safely do and show them what you meant.
Or switch them to Linux. For browsing/mail it's perfect. And if they want to have Windows games then make a separate partition where they play there and cut access to internet for that Windows installation.
> Or switch them to Linux. For browsing/mail it's perfect.
My dad switched to Xubuntu a few years ago and has been singing praise of it ever since. It's a pretty straight forward desktop environment that isn't prone to frequent radical changes like some other DEs. I think it's an ideal DE for somebody with basic browsing/mail requirements.
Seconding this. Literally 99% of what many old people need to do with a computer can be accomplished with xubuntu/xfce desktop environment (which is now a traditionally comfortable GUI similar to windows 98/2000), and inside a browser like Firefox. Install ublock origin and a few other common sense plugins.
Thanks. This makes a lot of sense. Hopefully they will go for it. Next time I'm down in the Bay Area I will definitely try converting them and it sounds like it might be the best solution for me to be able to remotely assist with their computing needs. With the aging demographic in this country, I'd imagine there is some real opportunity for someone to create more tools to help those of us looking for solutions to help our parents navigate their safe computing / IT needs remotely.
I switched my Dad to a Chromebook, been several years now with limited issues, though he still does seem to end up with some very strange ChromeApps that end up screwing up his default search and other settings
Maybe I should transition to him to Linux and FF at this point...
It has gotten to the point where they really need me to assist them with all most everything related to managing their computers. Unfortunately I am 1000 miles away so we struggle on the phone to get things sorted out.
What recommendations do people have for being able to remotely manage windows machines. I am on windows 10 and they are still using w7. I'd like to be able to remote into their machine with admin rights so I can manage software, finances, etc.
thanks for any advice.