In a triumph of hope over experience, I today used a Windows
troubleshooter option in an attempt to address a problem.

True to form, it didn't work.

Has anyone ever got anything useful out of one of those troubleshooters?

Sylvia

On 10/11/2022 09:32, Sylvia Else wrote:
> In a triumph of hope over experience, I today used a Windows
> troubleshooter option in an attempt to address a problem.
>
> True to form, it didn't work.
>
> Has anyone ever got anything useful out of one of those troubleshooters?

They are all variations of 'switch it off, uninstall, reinstall, switch
it on again'

You are not prevented from jumping deeper into the rabbit hole and
diagnosing the issue, but this takes trained specialists, or luck with
Google.

--
Adrian C

On 10/11/2022 11:25 pm, Adrian Caspersz wrote:
> On 10/11/2022 09:32, Sylvia Else wrote:
>> In a triumph of hope over experience, I today used a Windows
>> troubleshooter option in an attempt to address a problem.
>>
>> True to form, it didn't work.
>>
>> Has anyone ever got anything useful out of one of those troubleshooters?
>
> They are all variations of 'switch it off, uninstall, reinstall, switch
> it on again'
>
> You are not prevented from jumping deeper into the rabbit hole and
> diagnosing the issue, but this takes trained specialists, or luck with
> Google.
>

I didn't even get one of those suggestions.

The irony here is that the thing that didn't work was the remote access
support software, with me as the person doing the supporting.

Sylvia.

On 10/11/2022 8:32 pm, Sylvia Else wrote:
> In a triumph of hope over experience, I today used a Windows
> troubleshooter option in an attempt to address a problem.
>
> True to form, it didn't work.
>
> Has anyone ever got anything useful out of one of those troubleshooters?
>
> Sylvia

Both systems are behind masquerading firewalls, but that's such a normal
situation these days that any support solution that doesn't work for
that case is going to be next to useless.

I assume both the target system and the support system have to connect
to some central server, which bridges between them. That way only
outgoing connections from the target and support systems are required.
One would normally expect that to work OK.

So I'd have thought a troubleshooter could at least say "You cannot
connect to the central server, or the target system has not connected to
the target server, or you've got the password wrong. I mean, how hard
can it be?

"Didn't work" is less than helpful.

Since I was really only trying to gain access to the target's local
network, rather than the target Windows 10 machine, I was able to
implement a workaround using Linux. It's at times like this one learns
just how computer illiterate one's family members are.

Sylvia.

Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> writes:

> In a triumph of hope over experience, I today used a Windows
> troubleshooter option in an attempt to address a problem.
>
> True to form, it didn't work.
>
> Has anyone ever got anything useful out of one of those troubleshooters?

Not that I recall. From what I remember, they usually do something, then
report they can't detect anything wrong.

Somewhat related, I've recently have some BSODs in my work PC. Usually
related to sleep or hibernation so somewhat avoidable. The BSOD codes
aren't exactly well documented, it seems I can get a symptom but not the
cause. And if the crash dump doesn't point a specific driver, there
doesn't seem to be much I can do. The computer is going out of its lease
period fairly soon anyways so I decided to limp along until then.

Somewhat deeper than the simple troubleshooters, Windows 10 has
something called "Driver Verifier" which is supposed to be able to track
and log if some device driver does something naughty.

I did try turning it on but then the system didn't boot and due to disk
encryption I had to spend some time with the IT people so I could boot
to rescue mode and turn it off. So, no actual help but I learned
something that might be useful one day.

On 12/11/2022 12:59 pm, Sylvia Else wrote:
> On 10/11/2022 8:32 pm, Sylvia Else wrote:
>> In a triumph of hope over experience, I today used a Windows
>> troubleshooter option in an attempt to address a problem.
>>
>> True to form, it didn't work.
>>
>> Has anyone ever got anything useful out of one of those troubleshooters?
>>
>> Sylvia
>
> Both systems are behind masquerading firewalls, but that's such a normal
> situation these days that any support solution that doesn't work for
> that case is going to be next to useless.

I did a bit more work on this, and it seems that the Microsoft solution
cannot handle the case where the target machine does not have a public
IP address. When I used Wireshark, it became clear that the assist side
is trying to connect to the target on a non-routed LAN address.

Even port forwarding won't work because the target embeds what it thinks
is its public IP address into the request document that's sent to the
person assisting. It appears to be both in plain text, and embedded
somewhere obfuscated, because changing the plain text value has no effect.

I suppose this explains the existence of various other solutions out there.

Sylvia.