During the same time period of time, I spoke to 2 support technicians via chat or telephone without them logging on to my system. They actually listened to my explanation of the problems and solved them, both in a brief amount of time.

It just seems like remote control gives bad support technicians an excuse to waste a lot of time poking around on a PC, hoping that they will stumble over some really obvious cause for the problem. In all 3 cases where this has happened to me, the techs did not listen very well to my problem description and were falling all over over themselves to try and get access to my PC so they could poke around.

The latest incident was after switching to a new internet service provider (ISP) a few days ago. Outlook was stuck in the Outlook Send/Receive Progress window, with all of my email accounts not showing any progress. To me, this appeared to be a systemic issue affecting all accounts, like the ISP blocking port 25 (Googling this a bit and looking back at my notes from similar issues with other ISPs confirmed my suspicion).

When I called the ISP's tech support, the first level tech had no clue what I was talking about (this in itself was a big warning sign to me, since this is clearly a very common problem that every ISP tech should be aware of). After I explained the problem, the tech just absolutely wanted to access my PC. No additional questions, no listening to what I was saying, just "let me take a look". So I indulged him for about 20 minutes, during which he poked around my email account settings and changed the outgoing server settings for my gmail account (the only one I allowed him to look at) to some other account with the explanation that all outgoing email had to go through their servers first (What the #### ?!?). Eventually, after not being able to get that going, he relented and connected my to the next tier tech support person.

The second tier tech, after listening to my problem description said "sounds like we need to unblock port 25 for you" and did just that. About a minute later, my email was working again. Magic!

Now, to be fair, the first level tech was clearly clueless and could have wasted just as much of my time without remotely connecting to my PC. I also understand that many callers to tech support aren't necessarily computer savvy, but that would have made no any difference in this case in solving the problem (other than that a less experienced customer might have been stuck with a bad solution, like channeling all outgoing emails through this ISP's servers, or even have their working email settings completely messed up by this tech).

I'm not saying that being able to remotely access a PC is bad; I use this technology myself and I love it. However, it should be used to aid, not substitute for, proper problem solving techniques. Ask relevant questions, analyze the problem and go from there.