Microsoft Error Reporting not all that bad

[cdd]

So a program crashed, which had been crashing for some time now, and Windows came up with its traditional "Sorry for the inconvenience [yeah right] but your program has crashed. Report the error?"

Purely by accident I chose "Yes, Report the Error" - and, to my astonishment, it came up with a message saying "Thank you - Click the link below for more information about your problem". It then helpfully informed me of the program that they thought was conflicting with my program and suggested I download a patch for the other program - and it worked!

I just thought I'd post this here for all of you (including, before, me!) who think Error Reporting is totally useless.

Chris

[freddy]

I've also always opted not to report as I felt it would be pointless. I'll give it a try next time. Thanks for the tip.

[Nick Harvey]

I tend to report about two thirds of crashes and get a helpful response in about a third of those cases.

All too often, though, you get what you expect to be the very helpful answer, sending you off to their website, only to be sent to a page that says "thank you, but we've never heard of your problem, or your program, before".

If they're not going to give you an answer, I just wish they wouldn't put the link in that initial little box.

[Nate J]

Yeah, with mine mostly it tells me

This is a problem regaurding your computer hardware.
Ways to trouble shoot:

• There is nothing you can do.

[Neil Jones]

Purely by accident I chose "Yes, Report the Error" - and, to my astonishment, it came up with a message saying "Thank you - Click the link below for more information about your problem". It then helpfully informed me of the program that they thought was conflicting with my program and suggested I download a patch for the other program - and it worked!)

Well Firefox 2 generated some sort of error the other day for something it didn't really like on some site somewhere, so I told it to send the error message (both to Microsoft and Mozilla's own bugzilla).

Microsoft's response to this error was to download Firefox 2. Needless to say, I clicked on "this page is so not helpful" radiobox down the bottom in response to that.

On the other hand, something else fell over the other day and according to Microsoft "there is no solution available, but do contact Microsoft for assistance in troubleshooting this problem".

[Reeves]

All 137 reports I've sent have been replied with "Unknown Device Driver". Bare in mind not all of the errors were caused by the same problem.