Hands On with Quick Assist in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update

Raise your hand if you regularly get called by distant, as in location, relatives to provide assistance with their computer?

Yes, me too.

Windows 7 and 8.1 have a desktop program called Remote Assistance available but it can be challenging to get a remote family member connected through that process. It requires a physical invite, basically the details to make the connection happen, to be sent to the other end of the connection to get started.

In Windows 10 Remote Assistance is still there however, a new option is now available with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update called Quick Assist that makes connecting to that remote relatives computer possible by just sharing a six digit number over the phone or chat.

Once your relative, or whomever you are helping out, gives permission for you to have full control of their system you can now provide the necessary assistance and even use inking to annotate on their screen to highlight anything you might need to show/teach them for future reference.

Although I could not get it to work in my tests, you can also reboot their system remotely and then Quick Assist should reconnect to continue the assistance.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, this did not work in all my testing attempts but it was easy to reconnect by just starting Quick Assist back up again and sharing that six digit code.

This gallery will walk you through using Quick Assist and highlight some of the key features.

P.S. Quick Assist is not the only good reasons to get relatives upgraded to Windows 10.

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Be sure to check out all of our Windows 10 Anniversary Update Coverage.

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