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you might identify a trend in a certain application crashing when opening a certain file type). The idea is to pinpoint any troublesome areas and take steps to improve system reliability based on what you learn (e.g. This tool provides an overview of overall system stability and details about events that can impact reliability. Windows Vista+ and 2008+ include a tool called Reliability Monitor. You can add comments during the recording process and then click “Stop Record” to save the report as an *.mht file within a zip archive. Click “Start Record” and the tool will record every interaction from then on. To launch the Problem Steps Recorder, go to the Start menu and type “psr.exe”. This tool is great if you have a user in your environment who is experiencing an issue that you want to gain more information about and the steps they took to reproduce the problem, or if you want to create a report to send to a third party vendor as part of a support case. It then bundles all this into a report with detailed information and any relevant error logs. The Problem Steps Recorder will record the step-by-step interactions that occur while the user replicates the problem, taking screenshots of every action. Hidden away in Windows 7+ and Windows 2008+ is a neat little utility called Problem Steps Recorder (psr.exe). When you run the *.diagcab file, it will automatically attempt to identify and resolve the problem. To use a Microsoft Easy Fix solution, navigate to the Easy Fix Solutions home page and choose which problem category you are trying to resolve from the list. From the Microsoft Easy Fix Solutions home page, or from a Microsoft Support Knowledge Base article, you can download an executable to automatically fix the issue or be directed to a relevant walkthrough that explains what the cause and recommend workaround is based on your answers to troubleshooting questions. Microsoft Easy Fix Solutions, formerly known as Microsoft Fix It, is a series of troubleshooting applications that target helping to resolve specific system issues. Even if you may have heard of some of these tools before, I’m confident that you’ll find a gem or two among this list. This list is intended to supplement the list provided on 101 Free SysAdmin Tools and Top 5 Free Rescue Discs for Your SysAdmin Toolkit. You can either use these tools yourself or provide them to a user who is experiencing the issue, for them to gather the information needed. These tools should help you as an admin to fix the problem or identify the root cause more quickly. Here are 10 of the best free tools / packages for troubleshooting system issues.
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