Today I found myself, once again, on the phone with my mother saying her something-or-the-other didn't work.  But the big difference today is that I have a tool that worked wonders in solving the problem and in keeping our conversation civil.

The call started with "My Google doesn't work."  As always, the discussion opens with a mysterious statement of fact that should make everything obvious to me but doesn't.  This one in particular didn't sound too mysterious; I was guessing my mom's personalized Google page wasn't loading so I start to walk her through the diagnostic.  "Try another page" I say.  She does, Yahoo works fine.  Hmmm. I try Google on my computer and it's speedy as always.  Normally this is the beginning of a long discussion where I try to reconcile her computer vocabulary to mine and I try as hard as I can to get her to avoid pronouns when describing the problem. "It doesn't do it's thing" is not helpful in a remote diagnostic. What was new and wonderful is that this time I got to say "Show me."  We used Zolved's Remote Control (for free -- always) and within a minute I was seeing what she was doing on her screen from my screen 500 miles away and I shared control of the keyboard and the mouse.

I was blissful - it turns out that she meant her Gmail wasn't working.  The first page would load but then it would get stuck.  I tried it a couple times and she was right.  I went through the diagnosis in about two minutes with her watching everything I did and commenting "I did that", and "I did that too".  It was great! I was reassuring her that she had done everything right while going through a very quick process.  We ended up resolving four or five problems in the session and no one got annoyed.  In that single session, I fixed her Google problem (required a reboot of her computer which I did remotely), I reinstalled Adobe Acrobat Reader and added the right buttons to her toolbar, I reconfigured her keyboard so she could change back and forth between languages, I showed her where Notepad was, added an icon on her desktop, and I set her up on Yahoo IM and showed her how to use it. 

In about 45 minutes we got through five things that have really annoyed her and she always forgot to ask me about when I visited in person because there wasn't enough time.  It was fabulous; I don't think I'll ever take one of these calls again without having the Remote Control Tool available.

Some tips if you use it (and some suggestions to the authors).

1. Getting the Task Manager up was tricky because Ctrl-Alt-Del went to my computer instead of the remote one.  There are two ways to get there anyway: a) Zolved thought of this so there is a button on the top left that will send the command.  b) If you Right-Click on the Task Bar (in Win2K and XP) "Task Manager" is a menu choice (OK, this was news to me so I thought I'd share).
   
   
   
   
2. Things slow down because of Remote Control (CPU use) so be patient.  My mom would double or triple click on something because it wasn't happening as quickly as she expected.  It's pretty good on speed considering, but you can help the process by encouraging patience.  I kept Task Manager up so I could show her something was happening.
   
   
   
3. Zolved left a "Zolved Remote Control Viewer" icon on my desktop for which I am very grateful.  Now I can click on that in a second and be looking at her computer.  My mom didn't get one like that which I would like her to have - is there a way?  (I'll research and update if I find something).
   
   
   
4. Remember to end the session.  In our euphoria of everything working and neither party being offended by the other we both went off to lunch and left the session running.  No harm I think, but I was surprised to come back from lunch and find my mom's computer on my desktop.  Not something I'd want to do if someone else had access to my computer.
   
   
   
5. Don't know if this can be fixed but I couldn't see her mouse change to different cursors.  Most of the time completely irrelevant but in this case she happened to be complaining about a "No Parking" cursor.  I had no idea what she was talking about (still don't) but it did go away after reloading Acrobat Reader.

All in all a great tool.  I was surprised at how easy it was for my mom to get it up and running, designed perfectly for her level of understanding.  The only funny part is that the second time she tried to establish the connection (after the reboot) she saw the screenshot image of the connect window that is included in the instructions and she was trying to click on that.  She figured it out but it was funny for a minute.  

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