Remote Assistance Session Establishment is Flaky / Pokey

  • Thread starter Thread starter Melvin \(clever alias\)
  • Start date Start date
M

Melvin \(clever alias\)

Does this happen to others too?

I am often called upon to provide remote assistance to my little community
of family & friends (sure wish they were paying clients - ha ha). They are
all (for the most part) running Windows XP Home edition with the built-in
Internet Connection Firewall enabled. I am running Windows XP Professional
and I am behind a hardware firewall (SMC).

When they send me their Remote Assistance request (by Windows Messenger or
MSN Messenger) it can take anywhere from 45 seconds to 2 minutes for the
session to establish after I accept the request. By "establish" I mean get
to the point where they get the "Do you want to allow this person to see
your screen?" dialogue and for me to see the screen. About 25% of the time
the session does not establish & we have to quit & retry.

If this works faster / more reliably for others, I would be interested in
hearing a few details of your network configurations (i.e. whether you or
your "clients") use hardware firewalls, etc.

I have Pentium 4 computer and high speed Internet. All of my "clients" have
high speed Internet and machines with Pentium III or Pentium 4 CPUs.
 
I sometimes see rather long delays over my private home 100 Mbps LAN between XP machines while
testing Remote Assistance. In my case I use the file method of invitation. I have no solution
however...

--
Al Jarvi (MS-MVP Windows Networking)

Please post *ALL* questions and replies to the news group for the mutual benefit of all of us...
The MS-MVP Program - http://mvp.support.microsoft.com
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights...
 
I service a school and have tried using RA to assist various teachers
remotely (cable-> internet -> T1 -> school). It is so slow as to be
painful. It does work, but has become a running joke amongst the teachers.

Bill
 
I should clarify that I don't have specific performance complaints AFTER the
session has been established; things work fine for the most part. I am only
concerned about the long times I experience in establishing a session.

About the only problems I find when actually doing a remote assistance
session (after session establishment) are that there are occasional glitches
in screen updates "display artifacts" from client's screen back to mine.
The speed is tolerably fast.
 
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