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SCREEN SHARING

Do NOT use screen share! Had tech delete OVER 800 IMPORTANT files.....she said were "garbage" files. I kept moving mouse to cancel she would take back to delete.....froze on my end. Now I can not recover any of them! Verizon is not helping of course. Just a warning

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smith6612

There are programs available online to undelete files, assuming your computer does not have a solid state disk (recovery is much harder on an SSD), and assuming the files in disk free space have not been overwritten. For Windows, Recuva is a choice I tend to go by. For Mac, I don't have much to offer but TestDisk/PhotoRec can come in handy, since that software is supported on everything including Linux.

In cases like these where the tech locks your keyboard or mouse out and they're doing something bad, unplugging the Ehernet Cable, USB dongle or switching off the Wi-Fi radio using the hardware switch is the best move. While control will not come back right away, when the session times out or the computer is reset it will.

COMCAST3

I hit cancel you would think when tech seen that she would have stopped. Instead she took mouse right back over to delete.
You said the tech can actually lock me out temp or make it so my computer would "freeze"? I did have a freeze up right after I hit cancel offering the tech time to finish deleting files. And may I ask how do you know this?

smith6612

@COMCAST wrote:
I hit cancel you would think when tech seen that she would have stopped. Instead she took mouse right back over to delete.
You said the tech can actually lock me out temp or make it so my computer would "freeze"? I did have a freeze up right after I hit cancel offering the tech time to finish deleting files. And may I ask how do you know this?

It's common sense. Pull the connection being used for the remote session, and eventually things will stop working in a sense that you will regain control as the program realizes the connection broke, and the remote session itself will die. It's just like a telephone call that won't disconnect: Keep the phone disconnected for long enough and it'll go away eventually. I do work in IT as well, so I'm familiar with applications such as LogMeIn, which companies such as Verizon tend to use.

Remote connection / assistance software isnt' designed to completely lock up the computer. It can stop input from your keyboard and mouse since input from your end completely blocks out the remote session. Almost any enterprise / helpdesk program out there, including free tools such as TeamViewer can do this. This is also handy for unattended systems or headless systems (computers with no attached monitor) so someone can't just plug in a keyboard and mouse and start messing around. At least, not without unloading the operating system such as Windows by powering off the machine.

If you have two computers at your home handy, give this a try. Go to Teamviewer.com and download the QuickSupport client on one computer. Download and run the full client on another machine. Use the full client to connect up to the QuickSupport machine using the provided ID and Password, and play around. You can lock out the machine (disable remote input) the same way the tech did. Now, if you remove Internet Connectivity from the machine running QuickSupport, within a few minutes you'll have control back.

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