Fog Creek Copilot Review
Some friends needed me to clean their computer of spyware today. It takes a long time usually (I’ve done it before), so I decided to do it remotely. I had heard of Copilot before, and it seemed like a good opportunity to give it a whirl.
Copilot’s strength is its no frills, no config attitude. I download a single helper exe, and my friend followed an email link to download a host exe. We each ran our respective exes, and presto, I can take control of their computer. Firewalls are not an issue – if a direct connection cannot be made, then it goes through Fog Creek’s servers.
It cost $5 for a 24 hour usage – well worth it for the convenience of remote access without any special configuration.
It worked well enough. The Vnc-based remote was not as nice and responsive as windows remote desktop, but it was adequate.
The only major issue I had was no support for reboots – every time I rebooted, I had to call my friend and tell her to run the host exe again. Most annoying.
Regarding the cleanup itself, I think it went pretty well. I used sysinternals to poke around, and disable some autoruns. I tried a few scanners, Windows Defender, Lavasoft Ad aware, and finally the Windows Live one-care safety scanner. Of all of them, the most useful was the Windows Live one. It was slow, but very thorough.
