Quality of Service

I get an email one morning from a friend who works at another site. She was having issues retrieving an archived email. This was a common problem at the time and just required a quick install of an updated client. We arranged a time when she would have a few minutes to phone and let me connect remotely to the computer.

It's 12:10pm and my friend phones. All I needed to do was connect to her laptop, install the update and check that she could open the archived email. Simples...

I ask her what her "pc name" is. Now we run a program called BGInfo. This pulls information from the computer; including the pc name, ip address, RAM, disk space etc. This updates every time a user logs on and displays it on the desktop beneath our corporate logo.

She reads out the name for me and I attempt to connect with remote assistance. For some reason it won't connect.

"Typical Microsoft" me thinks.

I try using a different tool, a VNC variation that installs itself and connects without permission. This too fails and I wonder if the name isn't quite correct. We check and double check, still I cannot connect.

I try and ping. It fails. I get her to check she has a network connection. She has. Finally I ask her for the IP Address. She reads it out and I ping it successfully. YAY!

I try connecting again, opting straight for the VNC option rather than the less reliable Microsoft remote assistance.

Success... It connects. It installs to the computer, asks for my password and I have full control of the system.

I proceed to run the fix and install the updated client. In addition I also remove some troublesome software that tends to clash with our antivirus.

Finally I notice a lot of word and excel files on the desktop, this is greatly discouraged by us as we try to get all staff to save on to the network for backup purposes. I explain this only to be met with confusion from my friend.

"What files?" she asks.

"These on your desktop" I reply.

"I don't keep any on my desktop, they are all in my 'My Documents' folder." She tells me.

"What about these?" I ask, as I still have control of her mouse I click and highlight several of the files.

"What do you mean?" She says confused.

"You see these files I am clicking on?" I ask.

"No." She says.

"These here..." I explain.

"I can't see what you are doing, you haven't done anything yet."

"Can you see me moving the mouse?" I ask.

"No."

Now the other thing that BGInfo displays is the username of the current logged on user. A quick glance up at the top right-hand corner told me something was wrong, as it was a man's name. I was connected to the wrong computer.

I quickly disconnected and finally established that my friend's BGInfo had not updated, it still reported an old IP Address that had long expired. I got her to run 'IPConfig' and I finally connected to her machine to run the fix.

Later on one of my colleagues got a phone call from a guy complaining that a computer in his office had a virus and was 'doing things by itself.' I don't know whose computer I had been connect too, but the lucky user had gotten a free upgrade without even contacting us.

Now that's service...