Remote Support Tools

Recently it came to my attention that not only can support be offered by pre-installing an application on a clients PC, but it can be customer initiated.

I tried NTRSupport and LogMeIn, both are very capable solutions. I also looked at GoToAssist as well although this seemed too expensive.

There are various advantages and disadvantages to each product, I did notice that LogMeIn was faster, slightly and can support ten customers concurrently, it also has a handy chat feature. NTRSupport are very good though and despite being minutely slower and only supporting 5 concurrent users, can be initiated from a web browser.

What it really comes down to is cost though and NTRSupport is roughly 50% cheaper than LogMeIn.

I'm still testing at the moment, so the Jury is still out....for now.

Wii Whiteboard and other amazing inventions

This guy is amazing, some of the techniques he has come up with for using a wiimote are outstanding, here are two Youtube videos demonstrating the techniques, my company has actually tried out the Whiteboard idea and it works really well, especially if the image is projected from behind the surface.

Flipping Windows

I had a call recetly from a friend whose young stepchildren had managed to invert the Windows XP display so that everything was upside down.

Never heard of this before, but a quick check online led to a remarkable discovery about a little known feature in Windows XP.

If you press ctrl and the up arrow it will flip the display as will ctrl and the down arrow.

The only question now is why would anyone want to do that!?!!?!?!?

Christmas and Gadgets

Sadly I didn't get any cool gadgets for christmas, luckily my father did, a Garmin nuvi 250 Sat Nav system. My previous experience with Sat Nav has been with one integrated into a PDA, using Tom Tom Navigator 6. I thought this was very good, although time to "first fix" (time to first lock on to a satellite) took a long time.

My mother comissioned me to find a suitable device for my faher on a small budget and therefore having discounted the PDA hybrid option due to price I looked at stand alone devices.

The two that stood out were Tom Tom and Garmin, others just didn't seem to cut it - on paper at least. According to reviews the Garmin had a faster time to "first fix" and the maps were more accurate it was also cheaper with full European mapping.

Having tried it myself now, I can tell you it is excellent, the mapping is clear, it is easy to use and it is fast to acquire a satellitle signal. If you need a Sat Nav device on the cheap you cant do better than this.