I have tried various remote assistance solutions and so far none had completely met our expecations.
We purchased Zoho Assist because its web-based control centre is ideal for a small team of independent Linux consultants like us, all the while having the features you'd expect from an enterprise-grade product. We were happy to purchase endpoint licence packages for paying customers, and fall back to DWS for less critical systems as well as personal machines.
While I have nothing against Zoho and am supportive of DWS, both solutions have a huge drawback in my opinion: we are relying on a third party to manage traffic to our customers, and we have no control over the data we put on their servers. Not that I believe that they are ill-intentioned, but we have to admit that we are also at the mercy of their technical and business choices: they may decide to suddenly change their pricing structure (this has happened with competing products like Logmein or Teamviewer), or they could change the product, remove features, move them to different tier, etc. and we wouldn't have much of choice, would we?
A client of mine has a customer of his who runs a Windows 2000 Terminal Server because their antique ERP client will only run on Windows XP-level machines.
I already converted the ERP server last week: a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 server running Oracle 10g that I had to turn into CentOS because its RHN subscription had run out and I needed a newer kernel + headers for vmware-guest tools. The RHEL P2V worked well, and now it is the W2K TS's turn.
The Hypervisor I am moving this to is ESXi 6.5 and it turns out VMware Converter 6 will not migrate a Windows 2000 system: for this you need Vmware Converter 4. But Converter 4 will not migrate to ESXi higher than V4.
So how do we do?
Well, here is what I am in the middle of doing:
install ESXi 4 in ESXi 6 (yes, you can nest ESX installations)
convert the Win2k system to ESXi 4 (you can do this on the live system) with VMware Converter 4
DO NOT start the newly converted VM in ESXi 4!
fire up a Windows system that has access to both the ESXi 4 virtual OS and the ESXi 6 infrastructure
install VMware converter 6 onto the Windows machine, and perform a V2V offline conversion of the intermediate W2K VM to ESXi 6
I have not finished migration yet (I have to upload Win10 ISO to have my Windows system) but as crazy as it sounds, I think it should work.
Update: it actually did work. I had to install an old version of the VMware Tools that is compatible with Windows 2000 to have proper display drivers and in order for networking to work. Everything is working now.
When daughter started university two years ago, she got a used Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen2 (2014) running Ubuntu (kids grew up on recycled machines using Linux), and she was very happy to have a good computer she didn't have to pay for. However this summer she started to have problems with it. I suspect these are mostly software problems, but she also had two missing keys on the keyboard. Sourcing a replacement keyboard and replacing it with the risk of it not working at all was a problem as she cannot afford much downtime, with all her schoolwork and two volunteering positions as a crisis line responder.
I know how she treats electronic devices (i.e. badly) so I did not want to invest into something too expensive, but I still wanted the best bang for the bucks.
So for the first time in many, many years, I decided to purchase a new computer. I know how she treats electronic devices (i.e. badly) so I did not want to invest into something too expensive, but I still wanted the best bang for the bucks. Daughter had also expressed the wish to get a 2-in-1 that she can convert into a tablet for displaying music sheet when playing the piano.
I got her a Lenovo Ideapad Flex5 14 aka 14ARE05 (awkward name), a budget-friendly 2-in-1 notebook computer with a 14” display, AMD Ryzen 4500U processor, 16 GB or RAM and 512 GB or SDD storage, 10+ hours of battery life. For $950 CAD (around $700 USD) it is a reasonably priced considering how Canadians usually get an unfavourable exchange rate.