Long Zheng has unearthed a really nifty tool when it comes to problem solving – the Problem Steps Recorder;

“If you’ve ever offered technical support to other computer users, you might find yourself losing a slice of your sanity over their inability to describe the problem clearly. And most times it’s not the fault of the user, it’s just difficult to describe what you see with words. A feature new to Windows 7, called “Problem Steps Recorder” looks to be the missing tool for documenting where it all goes wrong.

What the tool is a simple but advanced variation of a screen capture software. Think of it as an automated “Print Screen” plus a little monkey in the background documenting all the mouse clicks, key strokes and gathers some technical reading material, who then ties up everything in a neat box and saves the results. The neat little box you get is a zipped MHTML report page which can be sent off directly to the help desk.

The report page is where this tool really shines. It actually is an XML page documenting each step of the user’s actions complete with a screenshot with the item highlighted. You can view the report as is, or as a slideshow, or even dig into the raw XML to expose greater detail like the X&Y coordinates of the mouse…”

Long presents both a video of the tool in process as well an example of one of the reports made with the tool. Of course, I had to try this thing for myself so I typed in psr.exe in the Windows 7 start menu on just minimized a series of windows before stopping the recording. Underneath are some screenshots of the report;

I not only see this as valuable for troubleshooting bugs for Microsoft, but also for those of us that are always used as the local help desk. Precise problem descriptions are now readily available. Nifty! I commend Long on finding this one!

If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you better hurry to one of these destinations;

Windows 7 Beta Customer Preview Program Download

Windows 7 Beta x32 download

Windows 7 Beta x64 download

As I mentioned in my previous post Windows 7 Beta has a bug that corrupts MP3 files if you use the Windows Media Player to edit or automatically update MP3 file meta data. MS has released a patch that you should install;

Windows 7 Beta x32 Patch

Windows 7 Beta x64 Patch

Microsoft has said that the first 2.5 million people will get to preview the beta, so hurry up if you are interested.

I took Paul Thurrott’s challenge and installed Windows 7 Beta on my main computer; this Hp dv9074es laptop. After downloading the file from technet, burning it to DVD, along with backing up and moving some data, I formatted the C drive and installed Windows 7 Beta. The installation process? Smoother than ever. It did not take long until the system was up and running. After checking the Device Manager I found that there were 2 base computer devices (which turned out to be my Ricoh 5 in 1 card reader, and 1 additional cpu driver that hadn’t installed correctly. After opening the folder where I had my Vista x64 drivers, the Device Manager was clean in just about 5 minutes.

I then installed the KB961367 update, which fixes the bug that caused Win 7 to disrupt mp-3 files. Then I installed Norton Internet Security 2009 without a glitch. Next up was the Windows Live Essentials suite and then Office 2007. No problems whatsoever.

Then came the time to install iTunes…

First: I love my iPhone. It is just great, with all the shortcomings it has, it still is the best phone I have ever had. No doubt. Too bad that I have to use an app like iTunes to sync it (I know there are alternatives – but not complete alternatives).

To be honest I also found my first mistake in making backups before wiping the C drive; I had forgotten to backup my playlists… 🙁 . Anyway – after having installed iTunes, which in itself went without any problems, I find myself in a situation where it freezes or crashes when I try to edit album and song information, particularly when trying to add album art. Try adding it to 3 albums in a row – total freeze up. Not one button works and I have to resort to the Task Manager to quit the application – and even that does not work all the time. Bummer…

I don’t know whether this is related to one of the drivers in iTunes, iTunes itself or something in Windows 7, but it really p… me off for a while. Leaving the album art as it is makes the app workable although not perfect. Lets see it there will be an update on apple.com in the future. Unless, of course, this problem is only mine…

Besides that my first impressions of Windows 7 is good – really good. It is almost unbelievable that this is a beta product. The quality of it is simply stunning.

I will poke around the system for the next few days and then write up some more of my impressions, but for now it looks like Microsoft has got a winner or their hands.

edited; Removed the number 1 after “Windows 7 Beta” since it was incorrect; there is only going to be 1 public beta – next up is the Release Candidate!