How to use the Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder

Microsoft’s Gift to Tech Support

Ever try to describe to a tech support person over the phone how your computers error message occurred? It’s very often an exercise in frustration. “Why can’t they understand what I’m thinking?”  Tech Support has always been in desperate need of magical ESP powers. Since science hasn’t come up with anything of the sort – the film “Men who stare at goats” not withstanding – the next best thing would be a picture, or more precisely, a screen-shot or two, or three, with instructions regarding which key was pressed or which icon was clicked.  Well good news! If you have Windows 7, you can do just that. Microsoft has made life for Tech Support folks a bit easier by including a program called “Problem Steps Recorder” – PSR for short – in Windows 7. Just launch PSR (details below), click the “Start Record” button, and go through the steps that caused your error message to appear. Once you have the evidence, click the “Stop Record” button and save the recorded steps to a ZIP file. Then email the file to Tech Support. Very simple, and very cool! To help you become familiar with PSR, I’ve included some screen-shots of it in use.

To launch the Problem Steps Recorder, click on the Windows 7 Start button and type “Problem Steps” or “PSR” into the “Search Programs and Files” dialog box. It doesn’t matter if it is in upper or lower case letters.

Click "Record steps to reproduce problem" to launch PSR

Notice that Windows 7 has found the program and listed it for you to select. Just click on “Record steps to reproduce a problem” and the Problem Steps Recorder will launch. PSR takes up very little room on the screen. There are only a few buttons and settings.

Click "Start Record" to begin recording your steps

Probably the only setting you might want to change is the one that tells PSR where to save the recording to. At the far right side of the PSR control you will see a downward pointing button. Click this down arrow to display a menu of options. You will see “Settings” as one of those.

Click the down arrow to display the PSR options menu

When you click “Settings” you will see just three options. “Output Location” is where you tell PSR the directory to save the recording to. Click the “Browse” button to the right and select your folder of choice. I just use the “Desktop”. The “Enable screen capture” option allows you to turn on, or off, the capture of display screens. In almost all cases, you would want to leave this set to “Yes”.  The final option tells PSR how many screen captures to store. It is set to 25 as a default and is more than enough for pretty much anybody.

Click "Settings" to see the PSR options

Click OK to close the “Settings” dialog box.

Recording Problem Steps

Assuming you are ready to start recording, just click the “Start Record” button. PSR begins recording screen images, keystrokes and mouse clicks to an MHT file  (which you can view with Internet Explorer). All you need to do now is repeat the steps that led to your error. As an example, I’m going to include some screen-shots from an error message I received when trying to login to a website. I recently created a new account at a site called vericlix.com but I was never actually able to login. I kept getting the message “Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)”.  True, this particular scenario isn’t very difficult to describe over the phone but…let’s run with it anyway.

With PSR recording every step, I opened Firefox web browser and entered the vericlix.com address. I then clicked on the vericlix.com “Login” button and received the same error message as I did previously. Since I now have my error message displayed, I clicked the back button once more to take me to the previous screen. I did this because during the creation of my first recording, I noticed that PSR did not capture the last screen… the one with the error message. I repeated the whole process and added the extra step of going back to the previous web page and that did the trick. My error screen was recorded. Perhaps PSR needs some sort of trigger to tell it when to capture the screen-shot and it appears “back button” was the trigger in this case. OK, I’ve got what I wanted and I can now tell PSR to stop recording by pressing the “Stop Record” button.

To stop recording, press the "Stop Record" button

Once you click “Stop Record”, if PSR has captured anything, it will prompt you for a name and a place to save the Zip file. I called my Zip file “VeriClix.com Login Error”.  The actual filename given to the PSR recording – which is stored inside the Zip file – is created automatically by PSR and looks similar to this:   Problem_20091201_1221.mht    The name consists of the word “Problem” followed by the date and time of the recording, and the extension MHT.

The Zip file and data file generated by Problem Steps Recorder

I have not found a way to include the contents of the mht file generated by Problem Steps Recorder, but I have included a screen-shot of how it looks in Internet Explorer.

Screen-shot of Problem Steps Recorders recorded data

That’s it in a nutshell. You can now send the Zip file to the Tech Support person and make his/her job much easier.