Free Copilot Today, for Father’s Day - too late for me!

On Friday my dad called to tell me that his computer wouldn’t boot up - that it would give the error Windows\System32\Config\System Corrupt or Missing. Definitely not a good thing. After a lot of over the phone Windows repair kungfu, I called the time of death and declared this installation of Windows kaput. Yesterday, he found a spare hard drive lying around and installed Windows XP Pro on it. He then called me to ask me to help him set up the LAN and copy files over from the old hard drive. 

Now, normally I would simply have him log into Windows Live Messenger, and request remote assistance - except that the router at this particular location either had UPnP disabled or busted. As a result, our computers couldn’t see each other. Fortunately, I remembered Copilot - a product/service that allows you to easily control another person’s computer. They charge by time - but you can get a 24 hour pass for $5.00.

Copilot turned out to be very easy to set up and use, and in short order I was able to reconfigure my dad’s computer and router so that I can use Remote Desktop to RDP (RDC?) directly in. It struck me that Copilot was very similar to VNC which I use frequently to control my Mac at home - and that’s because it is . Personally I prefer RDP because the perf is a little better, and the graphics are a little better - but it’s not for the faint of heart, and I’ll need to disable this security hazard on my dad’s computer at some point.

But in a pinch, Copilot is pretty nifty. And it’s free all day today. I’d recommend it.

BTW, Joel, head of Fog Creek, the company that produces Copilot, has a pretty good blog entry on font smoothing/anti-aliasing: Windows vs Mac/IE vs Safari. You might want to give it a read.

Oh yeah, later while copying files from the old hard drive to the new one, I encountered a whole bunch of cyclic redundancy check errors - I guess the hard drive is failing.