Practicing the Black Art (11/03)
Microsoft Error Reporting
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@home.com
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
Being the largest software company in the world has its problems. Every mistake is played up in the media. Hackers are doing their utmost to exploit every flaw in your systems, and others vilify you simply because you are successful. Having your software crash, even occasionally, doesn't help your reputation because your products are installed in so many places internationally that you directly or indirectly touch the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.
For
some time now, Microsoft has been trying to improve its products with its
system of error reporting and customer feedback. Good customer feedback has
always been a driving force to product improvement when a company is willing
to listen to the people who buy and use its products. Let?s take a look at
error reporting in Windows XP and XP Office. Have you ever seen anything like
the illustration on the right? The odds are that you have, and you didn't like
it because it comes about only when something bad happens to your operating
system or one of its applications. In this case, something has caused
Microsoft Word to become unstable. The program needs to be shut down, and you
may lose some data. Fortunately, the default action is to make an attempt to
recover information and restart the program.
The dialog box also informs you that an error report has been created, and if you would be so kind as to send it to Microsoft, they will use the information to improve their product. You are given assurances that any information sent will remain anonymous and confidential. If you are curious, you can see what's in the report by left-clicking on the blue hyperlink located near the bottom right of the box. Before deciding to send the report, lets take a look at what the description says. Not very informative, is it? For most normal people, the report may as well be written in Sanskrit. Product developers might, however, consider the report a gold mine of information. Memory addresses, CPU states, page faults, and exception reports have great meaning to programmers and developers. They wouldn't be asking for this stuff if they didn't believe it was important.
Scrolling through the report probably won't reveal anything except incomprehensible gibberish to anyone except the aforementioned technical types. So lets close the box and return to the original problem report. We decide to send the error report, and we get the next box in the series.
This merely informs you of the error reporting procedure?s progress while preparing, making connections and transmitting the required information to Microsoft. There is nothing mysterious here. The whole thing usually takes less than a minute.
During error reporting you may see an additional dialog box with extra detail about what's included in the report, along with further assurances that your data will not be used to reveal any personal information.
The blue underlined hyperlinks let you examine the technical details of the report again or you can go to Microsoft's web site for a lengthy, detailed explanation of exactly what will and will not be done with the details.
Microsoft wants the information so it can fix problems, identify trends, and discover how customers really use their products. Ideally, Microsoft will then make enhancements that really matter. The error reporting procedure has gotten mixed reviews from the computer industry and customers alike, mostly because of perceived privacy issues.
If you really and truly believe that Microsoft is the ?Evil Empire? and run by Darth Vader clones, it's very easy to bypass the whole process, preventing the hordes from invading your privacy. All you have to do is:
1. Right-click on the My Computer icon on your desktop. 2. Select Properties Properties.
3. Click on the Advanced tab.
4. Click on the Error Reporting button.
5. Select Disable error reporting reporting.
You will never again be asked to send an error report to Microsoft. When your system or applications have a problem, it will go completely unnoticed by anyone who could help fix it, but that's your choice.
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Copyright 2003. This article is from the November 2003 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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