Dave is good. Maybe even one of the best. As a supporter his Kung foo is powerful. Inside the Windows registry, it’s like he’s in the Matrix.
Where others just see random numbers or unintelligible words, it’s as if he can see the truth of what’s really going on behind the scenes. When customers contact his IT services company with computer problems, they’re in good hands, no matter what the problem.
At this point I have gotten NO **bleep** response from Teamviewer, this coming weekend I WILL set up my own VPN and will tell my IT guys at the company I work for COMCAST/NBC NOT TO USE TEAM VIEWER ANYMORE. Granted I'm using the free one for not work purposes just my home systems and devices, but still this is rediculous behavoir for a company.
He works quickly and efficiently, but he takes his time when necessary to answer questions or offer explanations. He knows IT inside and out. It’s his realm.
Most of all though, he just really enjoys helping people. However, like everyone else, Dave has a lot going on in his life. He just got engaged to an amazing woman.
The band he plays in on the weekends just lined up its first real gig, and he’s even winning his office’s fantasy football league. Life is pretty good sometimes. It doesn’t mean that it’s not without stress though. Fight or flight Christmas is getting closer with every passing day, and he hasn’t even thought about what gifts he’s going get his family and loved ones. Actually, as he sits at his desk thinking about it and watching the snow slowly descending through the glow of the soft yellow lights outside, he can already feel his heart starting to pound. He shakes his head and can only sigh as he recalls an article he read the other day about how the huge crowds shopping during the Christmas season can be the cause of so much stress that it can stimulate primal “fight or flight” feelings in people. In fact, one study even showed that some male shoppers at Christmas frequently experienced stress similar to that of soldiers in combat.
They would rather get shot at than have to go into the perfume section of the department store at Christmas time. That doesn’t even begin to cover the feelings of guilt or inadequacy associated with choosing the wrong gifts. What do you even buy for the perfect woman? Just then, a flashing notification on his monitor startles Dave back to consciousness. Better so, he thinks to himself as he opens the session. “Hi, this is David, what can I help you with?” Ten minutes later, the problem is solved and Dave has again saved the day and relieved a lot stress on the other end of the connection.
Idle session timeout “Oh man, look at the time. I gotta get going, but what the heck am I even gonna buy? Uugh.” Dave throws on his coat, grabs his keys and dashes out of the office. There’s just one problem. That last session is still running. The guy on the other end of the line was in a bit of hurry himself. So is that session going to stay open all weekend?
Not with TeamViewer. Thirty minutes later the idle session shuts down automatically. With TeamViewer 10, idle session timeout is a user-definable option that can be set from 30 minutes to up to eight hours. Supporters and their clients never have to worry about idle sessions remaining open. To have this peace of mind, just download TeamViewer 10. “With TeamViewer 10, idle session timeout is a user-definable option that can be set from 30 minutes to up to eight hours.” I landed here looking for a way to stop this. I’m tried of idle timeouts;-).
So I hunted around the options and found a candidate under Extras, Options, Advanced, Advanced settings for connections to other computers and find a slider for Timeout inactive session. But it’s set to off already.
I does go up to 8 hours as mentioned in your article, but I have it off, and for good measure I checked both ends of the connection and they both have it off. So is there any way I can deactivate this idle session timeout? Hello Rich, Thanks for your comment.
When a connection with a free version of TeamViewer is established and the connection is a TCP connection the session will be disconnected after three hours. Please note you can always establish a new connection again immediately afterwards. However, each case can be different and there can be other reasons causing the time out.
For example, some connections are UDP connections instead of TCP connections. Sometimes the issue can be caused by the internet connection. In such cases we’re not able to tell what is causing the issue without taking a look at the TeamViewer log files of the respective device. As we don’t want to give inadequate solutions we ask our users to submit a support ticket so that we can investigate what is causing the issue. I hope this answers your question.
If you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact us again. Hi Boris, Thank you for your message. When there’s a TCP connection established with TeamViewer the session will be disconnected after three hours.
However, you can reconnect immediately. Please note that not all TeamViewer connections are TCP connections. Some of them are UDP connections. With a UDP connection the remote session should not time out. Also, sometimes there might be another reason causing the issue. The only way for us to find out why you are experiencing the issue is to have a look at your log files.
That is why I need to ask every user facing this kind of issue to submit a support ticket. I hope you understand. I’m also having a problem with the 3-hour timeout.
It makes this program almost unusable. Having it dump you out of a connection while you are in the middle of doing something is just bad form. So in reading this page, I noticed that it was stated that the free version has this limitation but the paid do not.
So I thought to myself, “Oh heck, I use this to manage my home media server remotely I can probably throw some money into it.” But then I find out that the MINIMUM price is 800ish dollars!? You state it is “Free for personal use” on your website and then make it more of a pain to use than it should be.
You should either remove the disconnection(it’s one thing if it disconnects while idle. Entirely another when it disconnects during active use) or at least add a cheaper version for personal use!
If I understand correctly, if I am uploading/downloading files using the free version of TeamViewer 11’s file transfer, the 3-hour time limit can possibly terminate the connection, thus terminating the file transfer? Surely, you can see how this would be very problematic on a slow connection during the transfer of a large file, or if a file transfer was started toward the end of the three-hour window. Reconnecting may not solve this – it seems like a poorly thought out limitation. Is there any discussion internally about removing it?
Also, Juulia Ruha mentions this 3-hour time limit will not occur on the free version of TeamViewer 11 when UDP is used instead of TCP. Is there any way to force UDP? Why is there a decision to disable the 3-hour “feature” on TCP, but allow it on UDP? Hi Brad – thank you for your message. The three hour time out for TCP connections is part of the free version. However, not all connections are TCP connections. The three hour time out should not happen when the connection is a UDP connection.
If the file transfer connection is a UDP connection it shouldn’t time out. Can you please try if changing the TeamViewer network settings helps?
Go to Extras - Options - Advanced - Advanced network settings - check “Use UDP” on both computers in the connection (the local one and remote computer). If you still experience issues after changing the settings, please submit a support ticket so that we can look into it:.
What’s the status of this? I have the same issue as everyone else: setting the idle timeout option to “off” does nothing TeamViewer 11 still disconnects automatically on what seems like a timer, no matter if you’re even in the middle of doing something (i.e. This did not happen with TeamViewer 10. Please let us know when this will be fixed. It is obviously not an isolated incident. Please don’t ask for my log files, with this many people having problems you should easily be able to track down and fix the issue.
TeamViewer WAS the best of any kind of remote control software but because of this limit it is now almost useless. I often transfer rather big files from a computer with slow connection so 3 hours is not even close to enough. You just keep asking for logs when you know that will not help in 99% of cases because it is intentional, VERY annoying ‘nag’ for free version. You should at VERY least warn about this when file transfer or session is closing to limit but of course the only good solution is to remove that limit completely. Or if you want people to buy this, then for heaven’s sake make the price at least somewhat reasonable for personal users.
For this hidden ‘feature’ I am VERY disappointed in TeamViewer which is sad because I thought you cared about customers and not just money. I too have been suffering from the dreaded TV “time out” problem. We have now established that it was “intentional” in the free version as a form of persuasion to spend the big bucks for the commercial version.
However, I tried going back to the previous TV-10 as a test of two laptops 2 feet apart right next to the router, and it still times out – even in TV-10. One of the laptops was even directly cabled into the router – no difference.
This is under Win-10 Pro. The timeout isn’t exactly 3 hours – it is completely RANDOM. I have had TV run for upto 3.5 hours, if I didn’t touch the keyboard too often. Another time, it timed out in a few seconds, and I had to reconnect about a dozen times in 10 minutes!
I do NOT think it really is a “timer” problem – far too random. When I had a “pair of host laptops” (sessions) connected tonight, from one directly cabled client, all three Win-10 PRO PC’s ran for about 3.5 hours before drop out. I managed to “beak them” by doing some internet searches on the client, which added extra Ethernet traffic on the home configuration, and both hosts dropped out in a short while. I very STRONGLY suspect it is a case of TV-10 and TV-11 not being able to handle the communications load. Or, it is checking for TCP/UDP loss and giving up too quickly. Check your logs around your TV’s crash time and you will see several checks without answers in just a few seconds, and TV shuts down the session. Maybe if it waited 10 seconds the load might subside enough to not shutdown.
Haven’t tried yet, but another fix might be to TURN OFF all three LOG boxes in the EXTRA setups. TV sends a lot of traffic to the log files. Might run longer without logging. My log shows several lines like the following, at the timeout point: CarrierReconnectLogic80::StartReconnectAsClientInternal: TCP connect successful (then a split second later) CTcpConnection181::KeepAliveBeepTimerHandler: No KeepAliveBeepAnswer was sent. Stopping connection.
It seems that this “KEEP ALIVE” checking is done for too short a period, before TV initiates a graceful shutdown of the session. I think I will try to go back further – maybe TV version 9 or even ver. 8 might wok better??? TeamViewer is a “wonderful app” and I appreciate having it for my astronomy hobby – Too bad this timeout or communications (WiFi or direct connect) load sensitive abort is ruining its otherwise excellent reputation, at the moment.
As a follow up, the problem continues – “Totally Random” TeamViewer disconnections in far less than the “undisclosed” 3-hour timeout limit for the Home, non-commercial use license. – Is anyone using the Commercial Version, and is NOT having this “random” timeout issue? If even that version has this bug, it would seriously impact acceptance and sales of TeamViewer. Then again, if it works with a Commercial license, then why punish Home users, who are in effect the Beta testers of the Commercial version. – Been chasing and testing possible work-arounds for many man-weeks, under Win-10 Pro, and none of these work: – (1) Tried complete uninstall and then re-install of TeamViewer versions (9, 10, and 11) – all have the random timeout, far shorter than the undisclosed 3-hour limit.
Could QA have missed it all these months and years? (2) Used 3 different, recent vintage Intel i7 PC’s, lots of RAM didn’t solve the bug – and one of the PC’s even boots from a high speed SSD solid state drive, for all that heavy TV Logging. Not a hardware issue. (3) Exchanged PC roles, Host vs Client on TeamViewer – still get random cutouts. Not a client-side only bug.