Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder

[Ian]

One of my favorite new innovations with Windows 7 is the Problem Steps Recorder, a little software application that lets you create a slideshow of the current view when trying to illustrate a problem. This would be really handy if you are trying to troubleshoot a problem and need to quickly show what goes wrong (you could even post the process on w7forums.com using this).

What the tool is a simple but advanced variation of a screen capture software. Think of it as an automated “Print Screen” plus a little monkey in the background documenting all the mouse clicks, key strokes and gathers some technical reading material, who then ties up everything in a neat box and saves the results. The neat little box you get is a zipped MHTML report page which can be sent off directly to the help desk.

The report page is where this tool really shines. It actually is an XML page documenting each step of the user’s actions complete with a screenshot with the item highlighted. You can view the report as is, or as a slideshow, or even dig into the raw XML to expose greater detail like the X&Y coordinates of the mouse

IStartedSomething have the full article here, along with a video showing you how it works.