Dealing with Free Remote Access Software during Pandemic Times
Tags: helpdesk, remote, homeoffice, terminal
Published: 2020-08-22 13:48:28

I work at a digital marketing/call center company as an "IT guy" - overall handyman. This is my first post and it is my attempt at contributing to the community that has always been very giving to me. This particular situation is almost anecdotal and probably won't help anyone because it's too specific. 

But I have to seek a solution for these absurd situations anyway and sometimes I solve it thanks to someone understanding the benefits of sharing their own problems and workarounds, and other times I come up with a solution myself, faulty as it may be. I hope you find this as amusing as I did, that's all I can ask for.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/14p3xopvg6fm0vjrjc42.jpg)

# Remote

The transition to remote work was rather smooth since all platforms we used were already configured for that possibility, with the exception of a few minor tweaks here and there.

Having said that, in the days of yesteryear all our "help desk" kind of work was done *in loco*, we never had to deal with remote access tools, like TeamViewer, AnyDesk, etc...

Since we weren't sure of how long this exceptional situation was going to take we did not consider buying licenses for access to 50 plus computers, which in retrospective we should have.

So the tool I had/have at my disposal was good ol' *free* Chrome Remote Desktop. 

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ap0l980004tgz5wkfr1w.jpg)

Suffice it to say, this service doesn't even allow you to copy/paste from the computer you are accessing from to the computer you are accessing to, but that's a whole other thing.

I had to tackle the following situation:
A fellow worker's computer is an old Sony Vaio all-in-one with touch screen. Which seems like a wonderful idea until it's your turn to disable it because there's a friendly ghost pressing your touchscreen every other minute or so, making it impossible for you to work.

Originally these computers came with Windows 7 and, supposedly, disabling the touch feature was as easy as going to settings and disabling it. At least according to all the guides I managed to find.

For example, Sony's own [documentation](https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00012575
):
> 1. Click the Start button, and then click Control Panel.
>2. In the Control Panel window, click Hardware and Sound icon, then click the Pen and Touch option, or select the Large or Small Icons icon.
>3. In the Pen and Touch window, select Touch tab, then click to remove the check in front of the Use your finger as an input device option.
>4. Close the Control Panel window.


That would be a piece of cake, I would find the setting and put in the admin password.

Unfortunately on windows 10 the only way to disable, at least, this particular touchscreen involved opening the device manager and on my colleague's user account it would not allow me to open  the device manager with admin privileges. 

I would have to give the operator access to the admin account, guide them through phone to install chrome remote desktop, access remotely once again, and only then disable the device.

I'm pretty stubborn and decided that there must be a way to disable without all that hassle.

So I tried my luck with the command line. Found an [article](https://www.itechguides.com/how-to-disable-touch-screen-on-windows-10/), that purported to solve this issue with one command, tried it, no luck. Here it is for your consideration.
```
Get-PnpDevice | Where-Object {$_.FriendlyName -like '*touch screen*'} | Disable-PnpDevice -Confirm:$false 

```

At that point I thought: "My only issue is not being able to open the device manager with privilege, what would happen If I were to open the device manager through the admin-privileged command line?"
![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/8hpkt8di21y8pmfxu60o.png)

And I tried it. Opening the device manager with "devmgmt.msc" on a command prompt that had admin privilege. And now all the options ceased to be grayed out.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/5dyklt1034kpf0wt1zjd.png)

And here the device manager 

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/wq5defz5cprinmzr8mtk.png)

With full acess:
![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/omgz9zn4j8oowlb7gq64.png)


Help desk is rather stressful, because somebody's work is hampered until you "sort it out". I prefer much more to develop our landing pages, CRM's and actually program but unfortunately I'm not quite there yet.