Windows Error Reporting explained
There have been a considerable number of posts over the years where members have said that they have sent error reports to Microsoft but never heard anything back, so I thougfht I would try and explain what the purpose of error reporting is.
The main purpose of error reports is for Microsoft to gain statistical information on where the problems lie with Windows or with applications that run in Windows. Thus if "SuperDuper Widget Creator 1.4" is constantly crashing it can be reported back to the software authors, who can work on a fix. So the main purpose of error reporting is to make software and drivers less buggy and more stable in the long term, not to provide an immediate solution to the problem. However, there are certain problems for which there is a known solution, and it is possible that there will be an immediate response pointing to the fix. Most of the time there won't be any response at all, but that does not make error reporting a waste of time, far from it, and I would urge everyone to leave it enabled, as it should benefit us all in the long term.
Quote:
From Bill Gates at PDC 2003:
One thing that's been amazing at Microsoft is the impact that our monitoring data has had on how we prioritize our software work. I'm sure you've all seen in Windows XP that whenever an application or the system malfunctions, you get the ability to send a report back to Microsoft.
We get a lot of those reports, and we've created very good data-management systems to go in and look at those things, and therefore understand what drivers aren't reliable.
We allow anyone who has an application that runs on Windows to sign up and get the reports that relate to their application, and we've got winqual.microsoft.com where people can do that.
Today we've seen a lot of that activity from the driver manufacturers, but we want to see even more at the application level so it gets us working together on anything where a user is not having a great experience.
Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2003
Los Angeles, California
October 27, 2003
How WER helps customers
How WER works
How WER collects and classifies error reports
