Has anyone been able to get this damn feature working anymore? I used to think it was amazingly simple and easy to get set up, and this was back when my friends and I used MSN Messenger to get everything set up and going, it was pretty foolproof. Now however, it seems like no matter what the hell I do, I can't get the thing to work out with a single person I try to do it with. We try to send invitations over Live Messenger and one person types a password, the other person doesn't receive anything but a message in MSN asking if they want to start remote assistance. They accept, and nothing else pops up.
So we try the actual remote assistance dialog on the system itself, someone sends someone else a file, they open up the file and type the password in.
Suddenly we get this sexy little dialog:
We both tried disabling ALL of our security and enabling every single last "ALLOW REMOTE [Insert Random Name Here]" option we could find, and then tried to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt of enabling all the security, thinking that MAYBE Microsoft thought ahead and designed their security to automatically allow remote assistance past it, and maybe even took it a step further to not allow remote assistance if the person doesn't have any protection running at all (for some reason?)
Like I said, every time I try to get it working, I'm met with more failure. I tried looking up on Microsoft.com, I tried looking up on Google, and I'm just at a complete loss here. This used to be a cool feature because it gave me a very easy way to help friends who lived miles away in other states or even other countries, let me fix their computer if they were having issues... but now anymore it seems like the damn thing barely works on two systems that are functioning perfectly, much less one that needs to be fixed! Defeating the entire purpose of this once upon a time, very nice feature.
Sounds to me it might be a NAT problem. Some programs like bittorrent and web hosting applications need you to set the router to forward data from a specific port (port 21 if you have an FTP server that needs to be open to the outside world) to your computer. I'm sure there's a helpfile somewhere that says this remote assisting feature uses some port. Then you can log into your router's web administration and set up NAT to forward to your computer.
Well I'm sure it has something to do with ports too, but heres the part that frustrates me the most. Who's ports are blocking it? If I'm trying to help someone with their computer, they might not be too computer literate, in which case... it's not going to be an easy task to try to guide them into unblocking ports! Which like I said earlier, defeats the entire purpose of having something as convenient as remote access.
I've had the exact same problem. I used to be able to use it, but it's garbage now. I use http://www.logmein.com 's free service. It works fine for when I need to help Gramma with something on the computer.
Thanks for agreeing with me... but I'd rather not start a debate about the UAC here. Keep the topic on Remote Assistance. No more responses about the UAC, I've already read my fair share of pros and cons on both ends.
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Defeating the entire purpose of this once upon a time, very nice feature.
