Remote Assistance

As of January 2008, Computer Wizard offers remote assistance for troubleshooting software related problems. This service is not limited to any geographical area. We can do troubleshooting with English or Hungarian speaking people.

How does it work?

Remote assistance (abbreviated as RA in the rest of this document) is using a special software to connect to your computer using the Internet. The remote assistance software allows us to see your screen and move your mouse pointer and type via our keyboard. The connection to your computer is not automatic. It does require your assistance and permission to be able to gain access to your computer. Once a RA session is over we will not have any way to reconnect to your computer. During the RA session you will see everything that our technician does on your computer. When completed, simply close the window of the RA software and we have no more access.

Step by Step:

Call or email us for an appointment.
Appointment is then set for the RA session and we will call you at that time
To set up the connection you will need to download a small file to your computer and run it. This RA client can be downloaded from: http://www.computerwizardindy.com/r
After you downloaded and started the client you will get a screen like this:
You need to give the technician the number you see in the ID field. Only after this procedure we can connect to your computer.
The technician now will perform the actions necessary to resolve your issue(s) on your computer.
When the session ended please close the RA window as stated above.

That’s all! Very simple and quick.

How Can I Get This Service?

First you need contact us and let us know that you would need the service. You can do this either by email, or by phone using our contact form.

We will need a detailed description of your issue in order to determine whether it’s something we can fix using RA, or not.

Rates: This service costs less than the on-site service. Current rate is $60/hr if paid by check. If you prefer credit card payment there’s an about 3% processing fee. To do a RA session we need to have received payments for at least an hour of service.

If the job takes longer than an hour you will be billed for the extra time at a $60/hr rate counted in 1min increments. If the job takes less than an hour then your account will be credited with the leftover minutes which you can use at a later time. Service credits earned by referrals can also be used for remote assistance sessions. Any request for refunds are handled by our refund policy that you can find under our business practices.

Prerequisites

The following conditions need to be met in order for us to be able to troubleshoot using RA:

You need to have a stable, high speed internet connection (Cable, DSL, Fiber Optic, etc).
You computer needs to run any of the following Windows verions: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Any firewall software which might block the operation of the RA software should be temporarily disabled for the time of the session and re-enabled afterwards.
The computer should be clean of viruses, trojans and other malicious software.

What can be, or cannot be done with Remote Assistance

First start with what can be done:

Fixing software related issues such as email settings, installation issues, performance issues.
Optimizing your computer for speed. This includes removing unnecessary software, startup items and files.
Setting up, or performing a backup of your system or personal files, as well as restoring files from such backup. This requires you to have a storage device such as a secondary internal hard drive, or external hard drive.
Printing troubleshooting, if it’s not clearly hardware related, ie: printer is starting up fine, not displaying any error messages and is not out of ink, or toner.
Training, or demonstration of software usage for most softwares (it would be too long list to include here). We can send you the recorded session if you want to review it at a later time.
An assessment of the state of the computer to determine whether it’s worth fixing or not and how much the fixing up would cost.
Any other software issues as long as it’s not mentioned in the list below.

Now, let’s specify what cannot be done, or what cases we won’t attempt RA:

Computer infected with viruses, trojans, adware, spyware, etc. These malicious software often has such strong protection mechanism and embed themselves so deeply into the system that they can only be removed by using a special CD by a technician on-site. We will not attempt to work on computers that show signs of these software, such as: being very slow, showing unusual popups and error messages.
Any problem that is clearly not software related. Such as power-up issues, monitor, keyboard or mouse problems, connection problem, etc.
Boot up problems. Naturally, the computer needs to be able to run the RA client before we can do the remote troubleshooting.
Network problems. Again the RA software needs a stable network connection in order to work.
Reinstalling of Windows.

Important note: While a wide variety of problems can be fixed using Remote Assistance, not everything can be fixed. The above points are the main guidelines but we can’t cover all the cases in this document. Also some problems can turn out to be hardware related during the troubleshooting session.