Does Your Grandma Need Help?

Does your grandmother, mother, in-laws or the rest of your family need computer help from time to time? I know mine do and the biggest challenge is talking them thru where you need them to go without sounding impatient or condescending.  Now there are plenty of different remote control software applications out there but none of them seem to be a combination of easy to use, easy to install and configure, and have no cost associated. Not to mention cross platform capability.  That is until now.  I pulled this weed (TeamViewer) from among the many and let me just say hands down the right choice for the majority of us who just want to quickly help family.  This is not for those who are technically savvy and want to control their own stuff. We have many more options and ways of doing it, but if you want to quickly get connected to grandma with very little to do on her part then TeamViewer is it.  Two options, you can have grandma go to the website and click on the link or just email the small .exe file to her then have her double-click on it.  The software launches a window with a number listed and passcode.  Ask grandma to read each number to you, type them in on your end and your done.  You now have control of grandma's machine.  This software seems to breeze through NATs and firewalls with ease.  It has very good encryption and did I mention it was free (for personal use).  You may read on different sites that there is a 25min a month limit but that is no longer the case.  You just have to put up with some advertisements after you disconnect.  What really seals the deal is the cross platform capability.  I know lots of folks who are putting family on Macs since they generally have less problems with just general use.  But what if you are at work on a PC and grandma calls with an issue on her Mac? Or better yet as is my case, what if grandma calls with Vista problems (those never happen, right ;-) and I use a Macbook Pro.  Well it's no problem at all. 

I had this working in less than 2 mins between my Mac and my home theater Windows XP PC.  It only took that long because I had to download and install the software on my mac.  It would be even less now that I have it installed and have a saved copy of the client executable to send to family.