I didn’t know about this little gem, so I shared it with my team and they didn’t know about it either. Then I tweeted about it and found others who didn’t know about it, so I decided I should write a short little blog.

Denny Cherry (B|T) posted a blog on twitter telling everyone to blog as much as possible no matter how small the topic, so I figured why not do this one.

So What Is It?

Windows PSR “Problem Steps Recorder”.  It’s a nifty tool that helps you trouble shoot a computer problem by recording step by step what the user is doing.

How to:

• Go to Start
• Windows Accessories
• Steps Recorder or Problem Steps Recorder depending on Windows version
• Select Start Record (App will popup)

• Now start recreating the steps
• As you are walking through you can even choose to Add Comment to annotate your screen

Once you finish recreating the steps for troubleshooting just hit Stop Record and it will create a ZIP file.

Output looks like this (note it captured all 3 of my screens)

By default it will only capture 25 screen shots, if you need more you will have to increase that number in settings. You can also choose whether or not you want screenshots taken.

Go to the Drop down arrow by Help Menu

Choose Settings

That’s all there is to it. Quick and simple trouble shooting jewel I never knew about.

*Note to Denny regarding your blog post above it took a little more than 10 minutes to write but not much more.