One of the handy new applets in Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 is named Problem Steps Recorder (psr.exe). This tool seems to be based on the screen-recording technology that’s been a part of one of my favorite tools in recent years, Camtasia Studio, which I used to build some of the help content in the MarketCoach investment education CD. Camtasia Studio’s screen recorder has also been used by Microsoft in some of its training courses.
So, what does PSR do? In a nutshell, if a user is having a reproducible problem, you turn it on and then do whatever is causing the problem. PSR runs in the background, keeping track of key changes in the display. It doesn’t record a movie like Camtasia Studio does, but it takes periodic screen snaps when anything significant changes, such as the appearance of an error message. Then, when you close PSR, it generates an HTML page that references all the screen snapshots, and bundles that HTML page into a ZIP file – presumably for emailing to a tech support person.
Of course, PSR won’t help us if the problem that the user is experiencing isn’t reproducible. But even so, this is the kind of thing I’m glad to see Microsoft providing: an applet with practical utility in real life. Sometimes we don’t need rocket science, we just need a tool that does something simple but useful and does it in a convenient way.
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