Computer-illiterate mom has many, many small questions about her new iMac. I'm 2,000 miles away and spending hours of time explaining how to find her desktop to her. Is there a way for me to remotely control her computer? Even though my mom has been using computers (PCs) for about twenty years, she's almost a functionally illiterate computer user. I'd always assumed that she knew what she was doing more or less-- hey, I get emails from her, she sends me jpgs, etc. For Xmas, my mom got a brand-new iMac w/ Snow Leopard, and I told her that I'd help her ease into it. Macs' interface is easy, I told her, this'll be no sweat.

That's until I learned that, after 20 years of computer use, she never knew that you could create your own folder, let alone rename it. She had never used a keyboard shortcut before, not even for copy/paste/print/save/quit, anything. She had never minimized a program window until tonight. Needless to say, these things get in the way of me explaining to her over the phone how to, say, watch a quicktime file using VLC, copying photos from her digital camera (or even finding the device in Finder), etc.

Basically, I wondered if there is any way for me (I'm on a MacBook w/ Leopard) to gain remote access to her computer. It would be a godsend to spend 15 seconds over the phone saying, "This is how you resize your program window," moving the cursor on her screen, and demonstrating. Is this within the realm of possibility?