IT Expert Voice

Users are never good at explaining what went wrong, making life difficult for the people who need to support them. Fortunately, Windows 7 has a new feature to make debugging easier – even from a distance.

If you’ve ever worked a help desk, you know how hard it is to get meaningful details out of a nontechnical user who’s struggling with a problem. The dialog usually goes something like this:

You: How can I help you?

User: My computer is doing something weird.

You: Can you be more specific?

User: Well, I get this error message that says I did something illegal and then my web page goes away. This is the fifth time today.

You: What are you doing when it happens?

User: Well, I click on my Internet and this box comes up that says I need to flash someone and I click Cancel and then I get a box with a bunch of numbers and …

You: I’ll send someone right over.

Anytime you have to dispatch a tech to someone’s desk, you’ve started the meter ticking. There’s nothing more frustrating than blowing an hour of your best tech’s time on a problem you could have solved in two minutes if only you could have gotten the user to describe the problem for you.

If the user is running Windows 7, you just might be able to skip that expensive onsite support call. You get the user to run a new troubleshooting tool built into Windows 7 called the Problem Steps Recorder. (Click Start, type psr in the Search box, and then press Enter.)

Here’s what the user sees on his end:

You tell him to click the Start Record button. When he tells you he sees the “Recording Now” message blinking in the title bar, ask the user to run through the steps that cause the crash or glitch. The user doesn’t need to tell you what he’s doing (although a more sophisticated user can click the Add Comment button to add details that are captured with the report). After the user has reproduced the issue, tell him to click the Stop Record button. He’ll be prompted to save the report as a file on the desktop. Ask the user to e-mail that file to you — and you can begin your detective work.

So what does the Problem Steps Recorder do? Every time the user clicks the mouse, drags an object, or uses the keyboard, the software snaps a picture of the entire screen and adds a brief note about what the user was doing. The saved file is zipped up to save space. The archive contains a single file in MHTML format, which can be opened in a browser that supports the MHTML format. Internet Explorer and Opera support this format natively, while Firefox and other browsers require add-ins.

When you open the file, you see a web page divided neatly into three parts. First up is a header with clickable links to take you through the entire report. The second group displays a heading for each step along with the accompanying screen shot. (If you prefer to view the report as a slide show, there’s a link that will allow you to do exactly that.) This is what the report looks like:

The final report section contains detailed debugging information in a text box, complete with product version numbers, UI elements, and details about error messages and security warnings. Most of this information is useless to an end user, but it’s solid gold for your in-house developers.

Sometimes all it takes is a quick scan of the report for you to identify the problem and walk the user through a solution (or push down a fix from an update server). For thornier problems, you get an opportunity to narrow down the problem in advance, and if a visit to the user’s desk is in order, you can send the right person with the right set of tools.

The Problem Steps Recorder is even more valuable in the hands of advanced users. If you have employees or customers running beta versions of an application, you can use the PSR to capture meaningful bug reports. Train those users to run this utility when they need to report a problem, and encourage them to use the Add Comment button at key steps along the way. Everything the user types in those comment boxes is embedded into the final report at the accompanying step; that provides valuable context that can make it easier to track down and fix a bug.

The Problem Steps Recorder isn’t a magic box. It’s helpless in the face of STOP errors that crash the entire system, and it can’t diagnose clueless-user errors like a DVD that’s been inserted upside down or an external drive that isn’t plugged in. And it only provides information; you still have to interpret what those details mean. But it is a great tool for bridging the frustrating language gap between techies and non-techies.

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