Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

I just got off the phone with a client who is vacationing, but took the laptop along to get some work done and access his office workstation.

Normally, he connects using a secure IPSec VPN to the Fortinet Fortigate 60 firewall at his office. This is one of my favorite ways of connecting from remote locations and has served us well for many years.

But, (there’s always a but), his laptop seems to be malfunctioning this morning, so he called me.

“My laptop isn’t working, will that PCNow we loaded last week work from the computer in the business center at the hotel?”, he asked.

Absolutely, was my reply. All he needed was to be reminded of the password - which was stored on the laptop. Fortunately I had documented that and was able to give it to him.

That’s the real beauty of remote control software like PCNow. It will work from any normally adjusted Windows computer - it even works from a PDA or Cell phone with Windows Mobile!

PCNow has a 30 day free trial, which is what my client mentioned above is using. They do require a credit card, but you WILL NOT BE CHARGED if you cancel in 30 days.

If you have that kind of a need to access your computer remotely, give PCNow’s free trial a try.

For those of us who work remotely, telecommuting or, in my case, remote administration, being able to connect to work from wherever you are is quite important.

This week one of my clients could not access the terminal server at work because of Microsoft licensing. Now, we all want Microsoft, lovingly referred to as M$, to get the money they are due. But when that gets in the way of us using the product we paid for, it can get ugly.

“Terminal Server can not issue a license to your workstation, blah blah.” What it really means is that it WILL not. Since this user could get on with ANY OTHER PC, I figured it must have been something with his 6 month old Dell laptop, running XP. Link here.

After sorting through at least a dozen possible answers - hint to M$, this isn’t a rare occurrence, I found one that looked like it might apply.

What it boiled down to was to delete a key from the registry (after backing it up of course).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing

That’s it. When you reboot - naturally, you MUST reboot - XP will simply recreate the key. In this case, it worked.

C’mon, guys. If it’s really that simple, why not have Remote Desktop just delete the darn key automatically JUST IN CASE that will work?