The Pinged Hobbit

Remote support utilities are one of the things I find very useful in my normal working life. I’ve spoken before about Teamviewer and Logmein Rescue. It’s so much easier to support a client when you can see what they are seeing on their screen. The biggest problem with both Teamviewer and Logmein Rescue is their cost. There not particularly expensive, but if your a small IT company with a few distributed clients it might be too much of a stretch to your budget to afford them. Ammy Admin is a free utility that provides much of the functionality of the paid for apps, but at no cost.With that in mind I present Ammyy Admin, a free utility for providing remote support to your clients (or family members ). Ammyy Admin works in a in similar way to Teamviewer.  Just like in Teamviewer you direct the client to a website where they download an application. They then run this app on their computer and it provides a code that they relay to you, one slight difference here is that the system isn’t set to receive remote connections straight away, even with the code you can’t connect until the client hits Start. Once they do, as the operator you put their ID into your copy of Ammy Admin and click connect. Ammy Admin then routes it’s self through their servers to the remote PC and presents you with a view of their desktop. From there you can move the mouse, start applications, open files and input data with the keyboard just as if you were sat at the computer.

While it may not be quite as fast as Teamviewer, Ammyy Admin is more than capable of providing the kind of support your client needs. It might not scale the remote desktop to fit your window but easy to use scroll bars make it easy to move around the screen. Ammyy Admin supports file transfer just as Teamviewer and Logmein do. However it does also support connections through Windows RDP if it is available While the download of Ammyy Admin is free, there is a charge for commercial use. The charges are much lower than the Logmein and Teamviewer ones though. The free version does not have the nag screens seen in Teamviwer either.