Chrome Remote Desktop
Will Stapley on why CRD is the most important item in his tech-support toolbox
It might be a ravenous, data-gobbling, beast of a company, but you’ve got to hand it to Google: it knows how to make complex tasks simple. And this is definitely the case when it comes to accessing computers from afar.
Over the years, I’ve used various tools to gain remote access to my PC (Anydesk, GOTOMYPC, Teamviewer and more), but none come close to the simplicity of my current favourite: Chrome Remote Desktop (CRD). As you’d expect, you need a Google account to use it (get one free at https://accounts.google.com/signup) and Google’s Chrome browser.
I regularly use it when called upon to fix problems on the computers of friends and family. Most recently, a friend couldn’t download his emails in Outlook. I could have spent hours on the phone asking him to ‘click this’, ‘click that’ and ‘read what it says’, but from past experience I know that never ends well.
Instead, I told him to go to https:// remotedesktop.google.com and install CRD by clicking the blue download button. Once installed, he just needed to return to the CRD website, select Remote Support, then click Generate Code under Get Support to get his code (see screenshot below left).
Next, I went to the CRD website on my computer, entered his code in the Give Support section and, once he’d accepted the connection request, I was able to diagnose and fix the problem in record time (his invoice is in the post).
CRD doesn’t just let me fulfil my childhood dream of being a tech-support engineer (I got over it), I also use it to access my own computers from afar. Instead of using the method described above (which would need someone at home to help set up the connection), I enter a PIN to authorise the remote connection (you set this PIN for each computer when installing CRD).
I then go to the CRD website on any computer, and sign into my Google account, where I’ll see all the computers I’ve installed CRD on – all ready to be remotely controlled. Incidentally, if you regularly use someone else’s PC, do what I did and ask them to let you install CRD while signed into your
Google account. This lets you access it without them having to approve the connection each time, even after you’ve signed out of your Google account on their computer.
Sometimes I just need to see what’s on the screen (such as an error message), but other times I want to take full control of the computer.
In its standard mode, however, CRD won’t recognise commands such as Alt+tab (doing this simply switches between windows on the computer I’m using, not the remote one). To fix this, I activate CRD’S full-screen mode by opening the Options screen (click the small arrow at the far right of the screen), then ticking the Fullscreen option.
Additionally, when I’m remotely accessing a computer with a lowerscreen resolution to the one I’m using, I tend to untick ‘Scale to fit’ (see screenshot above) - this avoids CRD stretching, and therefore distorting, the remote desktop.