Friendly Neighborhood Tech Support

Great article here by my boy, Scott Hanselman, on how to help set up and maintain Windows systems for friends and family members who are lacking in tech savvy.

Adding my own $0.02:

• join.me is handy for small stuff, but it might require something more heavy-duty for extended remote maintenance sessions. I haven't tried gotomypc.com yet, but it seems like a more stable solution for hours-long support sessions with lots of rebooting due to installs/uninstalls/updates/etc. Free for 30-days.
• Install an SSH server for command-line authoritah. You can use DynDNS and their IP updater tool to keep track of dynamic IP addresses.
• I used to install all kinds of crap back in the day to deal with security: AVG anti-virus, Lavasoft Ad-aware, ZoneLabs firewall, and so on. Today it looks like Microsoft Security Essentials and the built-in Windows firewall (XP and higher) can handle it all by themselves. It really prunes the system tray of a bunch of intimidating icons.
• Portableapps.com has just about everything anyone could need for software. No more asking to "borrow" your copy of Microsoft Office. The best part is that the PortableApps menu can now update all the apps at once. Perfect.