SOFTWARE: Crossloop Rules!

For years, I have been stymied in helping my father with his computer problems by distance and a difference in knowledge. That, and Bell Sympatico's ability to make installing remote control packages very, very difficult.

Dad lives two hours away (52 minutes if my brother Wayne is driving, closer to three hours if I drive). It's really not convenient for him to unplug the gazillion cables connected to his computer and lug it up here to Brampton. He's done it, but with increasing rarity. And I've been unable to talk him through installing various remote control packages, from free to commercial. He needed to be able to give me back information, such as IP addresses, that were transitory in the Bell system. It was often like trying to describe red to a person blind all their life.

What I needed was the proverbial oxymoron, a zero-configuration remote control package. The ones out there that SAID they were zero-config weren't. Unfortunately, I ran out of time. I got a phone call one day that Dad's computer had crashed. And when it finally DID reboot, all of his settings and programs were gone.

Panic time. I looked around the internet for solutions. There was this interesting new one from Europe called Crossloop. I tried it out with Patrick. It took a little experimentation, since there wasn't much in the way of documentation. And, of course, we didn't read what little there was of it. Finally, we figured out that after installing the program and typing in a secret access code, we BOTH had to click the big green CONNECT button. It JUST PLAIN WORKED.

Got on the phone with Pops and told him to go to www.crossloop.com and download the program and install it. Told him to just answer next and finish when given the opportunity. He read off the secret access numbers that came up and seconds later, I was looking at his computer.

Suddenly, those difficult conversations that had me asking him to read whatever menu he was looking at weren't required. When I told him to click on something, I could move the mouse to the general area and SHOW him what I was talking about. And what was better, I could SEE what HE was talking about! The awkward task of translating what he saw to what I needed him to see became unnecessary. The task of helping him became EASY.

And, while I have no idea why his computer crashed, and there were no backups to help, we were able to re-input most of the settings we needed and he and Mom were both up and running within two or three days. I was probably on his computer a half-dozen times during that time-frame. All, while never leaving the house.

Since then, instead of curing problems, I've spent more time showing him new features of his computer. There's the occasional conundrum, such as why he was getting lousy photo prints (it was the paper! Trying solving THAT one sight unseen!) or why videos were not showing up on Firefox (CTV AM had changed servers and even an upgrade to the latest Firefox couldn't solve that. So I set up Internet Explorer for that task). On the flipside, I spent one afternoon just showing Dad how to change fonts and colours in Word. All thanks to this free little gem.

Crossloop is not perfect. Even with the higher speed connections I enjoy, the redrawing of the remote screen occasionally gets hung up. ZoneAlarm gets in the way, so the hosting end of the session has to click the buttons ZoneAlarm throws up themselves. I actually like that as a security feature. By the way, the secret access code changes every time you run CrossLoop, so that increases the security level immensely, and lessens the worry about using the product. The viewer occasionally runs in a smaller window than it should on my big two-monitor system. And the mouse movement is a tad behind my movements. But that's a trait of all VNC-based remote clients, which CrossLoop is built on.

Small quibbles with a simple product that just does the joh its creators intended it to do. I've remoted on a half-dozen computers to this point, even doing it for the house across the street. Now that would normally cement my reputation as the laziest man in the world, but did you SEE the snowfall in our area over the last couple of days? It's COLD out there too.

It's warm, comfy and helpful here in the cave.