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 in English or Hungarian.

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 back 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.

The following video and write-up shows you the process step-by-step:

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://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.

Additional Steps For Slow Machines

If you want us to check out your machine because it’s running very slowly then we would like you to do a couple of preparatory steps right before the RA session, in order to expedite things (that saves you money too).

We would like to start you computer in “Safe Mode With Networking”. That mode prevents most of the “junk” to load during the startup process and makes the first phase of the cleanup much faster.

Here’s the process which works on all versions of Windows with the exception of Windows 8 (in which this feature was scrapped):

Power down your computer
Locate the F8 key on the keyboard (it’s usually on the top row)
Right after you turn on your computer start tapping on the F8 key repeatedly (once or twice a second). You might get a beeping sound or you might get an error message about keyboard failure — if that happens then turn off your computer again, then wait a very short amount of time after turning the computer on before you would start hitting the F8 key again.
You should get a character based menu with items like “Safe Mode”, “Safe mode With Networking”, etc. If you don’t get that but the Windows starts up (you see its logo) then you would need to repeat the process from the beginning, you probably missed the tiny window of opportunity when the F8 key registers.
Once you get the menu use the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate to the “Safe Mode with Networking” and press the Enter key. The mouse does not work at this stage! You have to use the keyboard only.
You will see a bunch of “gibberish” – that’s normal just let the process run through [in some rare cases Windows does a disk check at this point without any notification about it - that could take up to 10 minutes, so if the computer seems stuck wait at least 10 minutes before forcing it to shut down. Also, when the disk check is finished the computer will automatically restart and you will need to be ready to press the F8 again]
If everything goes right you will get to your desktop, or the login screen. Log in, if needed, as usual. You will see a notification about being in Safe Mode. Just click “Yes” on that, if it comes up.
In Safe Mode everything will look bigger and certain things might not fit the screen. That’s normal.

Once you are in Safe Mode With Networking, you will be able to get online and download the RA client and we can connect to the machine, clean up most of the items that slow your computer down before taking the computer back to Normal Mode.

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: Please see our Prices page .

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, Windows 7 or Windows 8, or Mac OS 10.5 or higher.
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.