1. Control a laptop with fried graphics card/monitor.

    You turn on your laptop and what you get is that blank screen with colour slideshow and nothing else. You tried plugging it to an external monitor, but to no avail - 'no input signal'. You tell yourself :"weird? the harrdrive is reading and the logon chime.."

    Jump straight to steps
    Your laptop is indeed working, just that the monitor/interface has gone south. Naturally, you could try to tear your laptop apart and reseat the monitor connector or graphics card, check the board if you're using integrated graphics. If it worked after that, congrats, but if it doesn't, then.. This problem usually arises from broken graphics controller, and the color slideshow you see is probably the 'test mode' of the laptop monitor, because there is no output to the monitor.

    Sigh. Usually this problem can be mitigated on a desktop by replacing a new graphics card, but for a laptop is quite expensive since the graphics controller is integrated to the motherboard, WHAT TO DO? Buying an external USB video controller can do the job, they are cheap, or if your laptop has an external PCI port it's even better, because you can install an external desktop graphics card. But if you are not really into doing those things, and is planning to recover data or wants to access the laptop urgently, it is possible.. The Windows Remote Desktop Connection is one of the ways, but setting it up and getting it to work is almost impossible blindfolded, so there must be something better..


    UltraVNC makes a little software called 'Single Click' where you can preconfigure a Remote Desktop Server and run it on the broken laptop so you can access it on another computer.

    Instructions

    This step by step instruction helps you to control the broken laptop visually on another computer.
    Firsly make sure both computers are connected to a LAN, WLAN or some local IP network and can see each other on the network.

    1. Download UltraVNC on a working computer and install it. Run the vncviewer.exe with the -listen switch by creating a shortcut of the vncviewer.exe, right-click-properties it and adding "-listen 5500" to the end of the 'target' like this



    2. Download this, and open a file called 'helpdesk.txt' in the archive. Between [HOST] and [TEXTTOP] delete everything else and insert

    LAN connection
    -connect XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:5500 -noregistry

    where XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX is the IP of the working computer.


    3. Save the text file, then delete a file called 'rc4.key' in the archive, then visit this site http://support1.uvnc.com/cgi-bin/upload4.pl and upload the .zip archive. The userid is 'foo' and the password is 'foobar'. Download the resulting .exe file and copy it to a flash drive.


    4. Plug the flash drive to the broken laptop, and try to run the .exe contained in the flash drive.
          Some techniques - Usually on a Windows 7 (assuming the broken laptop is using one) with autoplay on by default (also assuming it's on), the first thing that should appear on the broken laptop is the autoplay dialog with 'Open Folder to View Files' focused first after you plug in the drive. So a minute after you plugged in the drive, just press enter. After that press tab 3 times and you should be at the search bar. Type in the exact name of the .exe file you copied to the flash drive, if say it's called abcde.exe, type abcde.exe then press enter. After that press down twice and press enter, the .exe program should be launched (you should hear the du du sound of UAC). After that press left once and press enter.


    5. On the broken computer, try to 'feel' your way to the 'connect' button of the program.
           Some techniques - move your mouse at different places while left clicking once at each position until you hear a chime on the broken computer. After each chime sounded, press enter and do this while working your way up vertically very slowly until the chime stopped, here you double left click.

    The broken laptop should connect to the working computer and you should be able to control it now.
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