My mum recently got a new computer and wanted some help getting it set up. The trouble is that she is a bit too far away to just pop over so I was trying to do it via phone support. When you do a computer task a lot, you have a mental picture of what is on the screen but I haven’t done a lot of new computer set ups in recent years so it relied on lots of visual description. Pages that I would have evaluated in a glance took minutes to work through and I was concerned about missing something important.

The new computer also came in “Windows S mode”, a configuration which only allows applications to be installed from the Microsoft Store. That might be suitable in some cases but not when you have a set of trusted applications to get up and running. We couldn’t figure out how to install Zoom Workplace via the Windows Store, despite me being able to see it on my computer, but finally managed to get out of S mode, allowing us to install a version downloaded from Zoom’s website.

Finally I could switch to giving support via a Zoom call and see what was going on at the other end. I know there are plenty of software tools that go even further, such as letting me drive the remote computer from here, but I’m not an expert in what is currently available and that would be another set of installation hurdles to get over so Zoom it is for now. Not perfect but being able to see makes it so much easier to proceed.