Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Send Reports to Your Attorney-Clients – Not Microsoft

In my last Tuesday Tech Tip I helped Certified Legal Nurse Consultants eliminate annoying pop-up messages that show up above your Windows^® System Tray whenever you send a print job, when your computer discovers a wireless network or if your computer simply gets chatty. This week we tackle another of my pet peeves – Windows Error Reporting. I’m certain that everyone out there who is not on a Mac^® has enjoyed the experience of having a window pop up in the middle of your work notifying you that some cryptic service or program has failed and asks you if you want to report it to Microsoft^®.

I’m totally for quality assurance but in all the years I’ve been sending these errors to Microsoft I’ve never gotten a thank you note from Bill Gates. Instead I have to click the “Send” button and then wait while Windows reports the error, then close the Error Reporting window and get back to work. All CLNC^® consultants know time equals money and you cannot bill your attorney-clients (or Microsoft) for all those lost hours clicking away and reporting Windows XP errors.

Today we put an end to the madness! Right click on your My Computer icon on your Windows Desktop and select Properties. When the “System Properties” box opens select the tab marked Advanced. Then click on the Error Reporting button. Next you can either totally disable error reporting by making that selection on the Error Reporting box or enable error reporting for just Windows or other programs by making the appropriate choices. I don’t want anyone except my CLNC^® amigos knowing what programs I’m using so I could either enable error reporting and tell it which programs to report or just turn it off altogether.

My recommendation – select “Disable error reporting” but let Windows notify you when critical errors occur (you’ll know anyway because everything will crash and stop working). Click on all the “OK” buttons to close out and you’ll now stop reporting errors (I don’t think Bill reads those reports anyway). If you’re a legal nurse consultant running Windows 7, I’d leave error reporting enabled to give Microsoft some feedback and help improve that new product.

Keep on techin’,

Tom