How to Remote Assistance to Get Help from a Technician or Friend

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Remote Assistance is a tool designed to allow users to solicit help from a technician, friend, helpdesk, or vendor. Remote Assistance is similar to remote control packages like VNC or pcAnywhere – for occasional support it should work just fine for you.

If you know a "techie" in your life who can help you, you can have them use Remote Assistance to help fix your problem. Follow these simple instructions to navigate the process and make Remote Assistance work for you!

Right-click on My Computer and choose Properties. Click on the Remote tab. Make sure “Allow Remote Assistance invitations to be sent from this computer” is enabled.

To ask for help from a friend, click Start and then choose “Help and Support”. Click on “Invite a friend to connect to your computer with Remote Assistance.”

Click on Invite someone to help you to request assistance.

There are several methods by which you can initiate a request. You can send an invitation via Windows Messenger, email, or save a file and send through a different method or email program. In this case, I am going to initiate my request by saving it as a file.

Next Page: Configuring and Using Remote Assistance in Windows XP

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