In the last post of my Windows Error Reporting Series, I discussed the question of whether it makes sense to disable Windows Error Reporting or not. Today, I will explain how you can configure this controversial Windows feature in Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP. I will also show how you can manage Windows Error Reporting with Group Policy.

Disable Windows Error Reporting in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2

In Windows 7, you can disable Windows Error Reporting in the Action center (Control Panel\System and Security\Action Center). In the sidebar click “Change Action Center settings” and then click the “Problem reporting settings” link at the end of the Action Center applet. You can also start typing “problem reporting” in the Windows Start Menu search prompt and then click “Choose how to report problems.”

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You might want to disable Windows Error Reporting for two reasons: You don’t want to send error reports to Microsoft or the “application xy has stopped working” messages get on your nerves. In this post I will discuss both topics and in my next post I will show you how to disable Windows Error Reporting.

Send error reports to Microsoft?

Of course, Microsoft and third-party hardware and software vendors are highly interested in Windows error reports because these reports help improve the stability of their applications. You might also benefit from this Windows feature if the developers get the chance to solve your specific problem.

However, more cautious admins might feel uncomfortable sending error reports to Microsoft. Even though the contents of the .wer files are relatively harmless, parts of the Windows 7 Privacy Statement sound somewhat unsettling:

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In my last post, I described how you can view the Windows Error Reporting (.wer) files through the Action Center. Today, I will review the free portable tool AppCrashView that has essentially the same purpose as the Windows Error Reporting tool. However, the freeware utility has a few advantages.

First of all, Windows Error Reporting does not show all available information. Whereas AppCrashView shows you the exact content of the .wer files, the Windows Error Reporting applet displays only the most relevant data. For example, you can’t see the DLLs that have been loaded by the corresponding application when it crashed. Thus, if you want to know exactly what information is sent to Microsoft, you should use AppCrashView.

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Windows Error Reporting (WER) is a Windows function that captures the data of software crashes and can report this information to software vendors via Microsoft’s Winqual service. In this Windows Error Reporting series, I will explain how WER works, how you can access the information in WER files, and how you can disable Windows Error Reporting.

Windows Error Reporting has been available since Windows XP, although changes have been introduced in Vista and Windows 7. Whenever a Windows application crashes, a WER file is created, which contains valuable information that can help you analyze why the crash happened.

While software vendors have to sign up to Microsoft’s Winqual service to access the crash data from their customers, admins can access it by opening the .wer files, which are simple text files that Windows stores at different locations. In some cases, the problem description will help you to understand why an application crashed.

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Learn how to create a bootable Windows PE 3.0 USB drive. First you you create the bootable USB stick, then you copy the WinPE 3.0 files to the drive.

For Windows PE 1.0, the minimalist Windows based on Windows 2003/XP, you needed an SA (Software Assurance), OEM, or ISV license. When Windows Vista was released everyone had access to Windows PE 2.0. This also applies to the Windows 7-based edition, Windows PE 3.0. Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment) was originally designed to deploy Windows. However, it is also useful in creating your own customized rescue boot media. In this article, I will describe how you can create a bootable Windows PE 3.0 (WinPE) USB stick, and, in my next post, I will show how to add your own rescue tools and how to keep your rescue stick up-to-date without much hassle. You will see that the procedure described here is much more convenient than most solutions you’ll find on the web.

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According to ITIL, the Service Desk is the central hub and single point of contact for users. Due to high licensing fees for commercial ticketing software, however, Service Desk staff members sometimes have to live without a supporting software packet. Some of them get creative and develop their own ways of structuring the requests. Others just use the task list feature of Outlook to organize the requests. The drawbacks of these custom solutions are many; for example, there is no way to measure the time spent with each support case. However, the biggest issue is the lack of a software mechanism that enforces the defined policies.

Request Tracker is Open Source software that supports the organization of the Service Desk. It is written in Perl so it runs on various platforms. For those who can’t or don’t want to install the software in house there is also the option to pay for a hosting service. Once installed you can adjust and configure the software via a web interface.

Request Tracker offers everything you need to build an ITIL compliant Service Desk. You can receive requests by email or via a web interface. Using the web interface, you can search for, prioritize, assign, escalate, and close the tickets. You can also define different queues for e.g. Problem and Incident Management.

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Sysinternals Process Monitor (Procmon) is one my favorite free tools. Microsoft recently released version 2.5, and just a few days ago Procmon 2.6 fixed a bug on Windows 7. I had a quick look at the new features. I just added this text to my former review of Process Monitor 2.0 at the end. If you already know Procmon, you can skip the introductory text and read about Procmon’s 2.6 new features.

This well-known Microsoft tool was already in the 4sysops free admin tool list, but I decided to add a new entry because a new version is now available. The old post was also about Process Explorer, which I reviewed two years ago. I transferred your votes to these articles.

I guess that Process Monitor is in the tool box of many admins, because it is one of the most important troubleshooting tools. The old version, 1.37, allowed you to monitor file system and registry activity. The most important new feature of version 2.0 is that you can now also monitor the network activity of processes.

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A few days ago, I blogged about BartPE, a well known tool for creating a Windows PE based rescue boot CD. Some readers recommended checking out UBCD4Win, which is an offspring of BartPE. The main difference between the two is that the UBCD4Win project is still alive while BartPE seems to have been discontinued. There is also no doubt that UBCD4Win is the far more advanced tool. The number of rescue utilities is impressive. And best of all – its Windows PE installation didn’t crash on my Dell Precision laptop, unlike BartPE.

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I was quite surprised when I checked the 4sysops list of free admin tools lately and found that BartPE is still not listed. BartPE’s PE Builder allows you to create a bootable Windows PE CD that contains various useful repair tools (file manager, disk management, check disk, etc.). BartPE is a great utility if you have to repair a non-bootable Windows installation or if you want to get access to the operating system while it is offline.

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Revo Uninstaller is a powerful alternative to the Windows Add or Remove Programs control panel applet. It comes with all the necessary tools to clean a system that has been overloaded with tons of useless applications. There is also a portable version, so you can launch it without installing it if you have to clean out a user’s PC of junk. These are the Revo Uninstaller tools, which I will describe below: Uninstaller, Hunter Mode, Junk Files Cleaner, Windows Tools, Auto Run Manager, Browser Cleaner, MS Office Cleaner, Windows Cleaner, Evidence Remover, and Unrecoverable Delete.

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This article reviews Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK) a free tool set that allows you to remove a forgotten administrator password and has many other recovery features for Windows.

Last year, I wrote a short article that explains what you can do if you forgot your password. Some of those who commented on the article recommended the Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK), a free Linux-based recovery solution. However, TRK can do much more than just reset passwords. Like MSDaRT, which I reviewed some days ago, it can be helpful to recover a Windows installation in offline mode.

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Most Windows programs have to be registered to work properly. Registering means that the files of the application (exe, dll, ocx, etc.) store their information to the Windows registry. Usually, this is done during the installation process, but sometimes you have to do it manually if problems occur.

If an application doesn’t work, the first thing to do is to uninstall it and install it again. This often helps simply because corrupted registry entries have been added again to the registry. If it is a simple program with a couple of DLLs you can just register them manually using the regsvr32 command.

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Microsoft has released the free Sysinternals Process Explorer 11. Most of the new features are related to Vista. Not everything is improved, though.

Process Explorer is certainly a must-have tool for any admin. I blogged about Process Explorer 10 a while ago. What I don’t like about it, is its sparse documentation. Some of the new features sound quite interesting, but searching for them in the Help file won’t reveal much in most cases. For example, I wanted to find out what “Show details for all processes elevation menu item on Vista” is supposed to mean. But my full text search for “elevation” got no hits.

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KillProcess 2.32 is a free tool that allows you to kill multiple Windows processes with just a mouse click. This is especially useful if you have to deal with malware like viruses or trojans. Sophisticated malware uses multiple processes checking each other constantly. If one of them got terminated, then one of its fellow processes will start it again immediately. So Windows Task-Manager is often useless if you want to get rid of this kind of malware since it only allows you to kill processes one at a time.

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Some applications lock their opened files which means you cannot simply rename or delete them. In most cases, this makes sense and it is not advisable to circumvent it. However, there are situations where you might want to unlock a file, like when a program crashed and you want to delete its locked files. Usually you have to reboot for this, but you can do this faster with Unlocker, a free Windows tool.

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