Been supporting my 84 year old my mother-in-law remotely for years, first using Logmein then TeamViewer. The latter has started periodically flagging it as commercial use is a big hassle to get it flipped back to personal use. Thus, looking for free alternatives that are also dead simple. Should be always available with no input required from her. She also lives in a retirement home with shared network so I have no ability to put I gateways, vpn, etc.
I have read a little about Ultraviewer and Screenconnect so would love to hear if others have ever tried those and what they think.
TeamViewer can get fucked. They kept cutting features from the free version and now randomly flag people for business hoping they will pay. Total predatory practice.
I use splashtop $15 a year for 5 machines. I stopped used teamviewer years ago after getting hacked through it and haven’t used logmein in probably 10 years. Splashtop is well worth it and easy to setup.
Install a WireGuard client on her PC, configured to automagically connect to your home network or AWS host running a WireGuard. Access her machine with regular RDP.
I had this happen to me you can contact TeamViewer with your ID and state your use case and they will reset it for you. Just did this literally yesterday
Went through this same issue just a few months back and found Remote Utilities, which I hadn’t heard of before. The UI is very good and it’s very responsive. I also like that it can do direct connection or use their servers to negotiate without port forwarding. They also offer 2FA. There is a free level.
I moved from combination VNC and teamviewer to NoMachine and it’s working well so far. I have wireguard if want network-level access but for Remote Desktop NoMachine is good
More generically, take a look at AlternativeTo.Net for finding alternatives to pieces of software. Then you can see what the options are and how widely used they are.