Whether you’re an I.T. professional or just someone who knows a fair amount about how to fix various PC problems, there will no doubt have come a time when you are, or were the go to person for your family or friends when something goes wrong with their machines. If they don’t live around the corner, it can sometimes be incredibly difficult trying to get a non technical person to explain over the phone what they were doing to encounter the issue or exactly what errors they are seeing.
Sitting there troubleshooting over the phone and trying visualize what the problem is and thinking what to tell them to sort it out it is often quite difficult when you can’t see the screen. Tools like Teamviewer, the new Avast Remote Assistance or maybe the Windows built Remote Assistance are options to hook up remotely to try and figure it out but connecting to the other user live is not always possible. If you do connect up in a remote session, you might not be able to recreate the problem because it could be intermittent.
This is where a little utility built-in to Windows 7, called the ‘Problem Steps Recorder‘ might be able to help. What it does is pretty simple but in reality could be quite helpful in showing you what is going on. It records the exact steps a user takes and then ‘records‘ them as a series of screenshots that are annotated and then saved into a Multimedia HTML (mht) file. This can then be attached to an email and forwarded on to you making troubleshooting easier because you will have the screenshots to give a clearer picture of what the other user has been typing or clicking to reproduce the problem.
Starting the Problem Steps Recorder is very easy, even for the complete novice. Click on the start orb and type ‘psr‘ in the search box and press Enter.
As it is designed for ease of use, there’s nothing here to confuse anyone, just a ‘Start Record‘ button to begin the recording. Clicking on the far right drop down button will bring up a small menu with the option to go to the settings window or create an email with the last recording already attached, just leaving the user to input your email address.
The default number of screenshots to be recorded is set at 25 but can be increased in the ‘Settings Window‘ along with the output location.
When the record button is pressed, the computer can then be used to try and recreate the problem and each action such as opening or closing windows, or clicking on buttons and icons will be recorded in the screenshots with a brief description of the action performed. Clicking the ‘Add Comment‘ button allows the user to type into a box any extra information which could prove useful later on.
After the recording session has been stopped and emailed to you, the Multimedia HTML file can be opened in your browser. A green box will highlight the area of the screen that should be focused on, and there will be a short description of the action performed. Hopefully, with the help of the screenshots and information provided, the problem will be a lot easier to troubleshoot.
Of course, the Problem Steps Recorder could potentially be used the other way rounder to show the other user what to do to possibly fix the problem. This is another one of those little Windows 7 functions that seems not to be as well known about as it perhaps should be as you don’t need to try and get third party software onto the other PC which depending on the users experience might not prove the easiest of tasks…
Windows 7′s Built in Problem Steps Recorder is a post from: Raymond.CC Blog