Several of our members who work at our Help Clinics have volunteered to provide remote help over the Internet or over the telephone for problems or issues that can be handled in that way. The membership status of the requester will be verified. Remote Help, like Help Clinic attendance, requires you to be an active member of BVCC. If your membership has recently expired and printing a membership form and mailing your renewal is not a viable option, you may now use the on-line membership renewal process at Get Involved â–ºJoin/Renew
Diagnosis and resolution of some PC problems, or aiding with some application problem that is unique to your computer, may require our personnel to have access to your computer desktop remotely. This requires that your computer is sufficiently functional to boot up successfully and that you have Internet access.
Our remote desktop tool of choice is now RustDesk, using a BVCC secure RustDesk server in the BVCC Training Center to allow our Help Clinic personnel to use the RustDesk Client on their computer to access the desktop of a remote computer that also has the RustDesk Client installed. Out Help Clinic personnel can easily install the RustDesk client on your computer and customize it with the required credentials to only perform encrypted connections to the BVCC private RustDesk server, and allow another party access to your computer only if you permit the connection to be made.
DO NOT ALLOW RustDesk TO BE INSTALLED ON YOUR COMPUTERS BY ANYONE OTHER THAN BVCC HELP CLINIC PERSONNEL! Bad people on the Internet will try to get you to install versions of RustDesk configured so they can get control of your computer without your knowledge and steal your data or install malware, Installing a default uncustomized version of the RustDesk Client only allows it to make unencrypted connections to a public RustDesk server (not intended for production use), can also put your data at risk, and doesn't allow BVCC Help Clinic personnel to connect to your computer for remote help.
Individual Help Clinic personnel may have other tools available as well, but we have moved away from both TeamViewer and AnyDesk because both lack licensing options that fit our non-commercial use of these products. Our usage pattern, while low volume and non-commercial, has a usage pattern that looks the same to them as corporate business help desk servicing employees; and their buisiness license plans are too pricey for our modest budget and low usage.
While much of our support expertise tends to center around PCs and MS Windows, we also have members with experience with other platforms and Operating Systems. If our helpers don't know the answer, they might still be able to do some research that could help you.
All our helpers are volunteers working on their own time, so we can't guarantee a response time or even a response day, but will establish some contact back to you as soon as possible at the contact email or phone number that BVCC has on record for you within the requested time-of-day window.