Never. Although last week I did, in a roundabout way end up solving a Win 7 problem using a clue off MS’s support site. Which was weird.
In my experience windows has never, not once been able to fix a problem by itself. Not found a single missing codec for pron browsing, not a single driver, not a single bug fix, not a single bsod.
It solves this problem for me about every two weeks. My laptop and my modem hate each other and the wifi periodically fails to connect and then turns itself off. Windows always fixes it. I don’t have this problem with any of the multitude of other wireless devices we have, and I should do something about the laptop but it’s never acted up for more than a few minutes at a time and I’ve been putting up with it for 3 years and will be replacing this computer soon, so why bother?
I’m the other side of it, I’m a developer, and yes, it does check for a solution. You can ask to have your app added to a database maintained by Microsoft which it will check for a solution. The only thing is, you have to license your program to do it, and it’s a yearly fee of about $100 or so nowadays to do that - the payment isn’t to microsoft so they don’t earn anything from it, it’s to a program verification company and is meant to verify that you are the developer of your program.
So reasonable idea except that for many small shareware developers, that amount is going to be maybe a week of earnings, or a month, or if you are a hobbiest developer and have a program that only has a few users, maybe even wipe out your entire year’s earnings from the software or mean you lose money from it.
And if you are a free software developer, it is just money out for no financial return at all.
So no developer of free software is likely to want to pay that sort of amount of money to Microsoft just to have the option to add solutions to their database of solutions. So if this happens with a free program it is very unlikely that it will find a solution, because it will only find a solution if a developer added it.
Very few smaller shareware companies will add themselves to it either, again for reasons of expense.
But microsoft products and the larger companies programs might be on it.
The solution anyway is likely to be to update your software to the latest version in the case of a program that crashes, that is what I would suggest as the solution if I joined the scheme. Also you get data from the crash if you join the scheme so you will find out e.g. where in your program the crash happened. Which is likely to be of limited value but might help in some cases.
It’s much better, as a developer, to add your own custom bug reporting feature to the application. That’s what I do. My software if it crashes, catches the bug and pops up a screen asking you if you want to send a report about it to me, nearly always anyway. So - then there isn’t really much value in joining the Microsoft scheme if you do that.
So in short, no point in waiting if the app that crashed is free, unlikely to be much point if it is a specialist app developed by an independent developer. Just might be worth doing if it is something that Microsoft developed, or was developed by one of the other large companies.
Oh, and it has never, as far as I remember, found anything for me :).
Windows is not the solution to our problem; Windows is the problem.
– (With respect to Ronald Reagan.)
I worked with a home-made Access database recently (like, within the last month) when, suddenly for no obvious reason, every time I opened the database with Access, I’d get that message about the app (Access) not working and Windows is searching for a solution. Never found a solution, and when I close the message box the whole app goes poof.
As best I can guess, the dbf file somehow got corrupted and then this happened every time I tried to open it.
Now this is galling, because that useless message box tells me nothing about what error happened. When I tried to run the database repair thingy, the same error happened. If I had tried to call MS for support, what in the world would I be able to tell them?
Wait, it gets weirder . . .
I copied the dbf file to a back-up file, just for safekeeping. I intended to fiddle with the original file (somehow) and see what I could salvage. I couldn’t salvage anything, but then I tried opening the back-up copy. Well, surprise, surprise! Access was able to open the back-up dbf! It displayed a message to the effect that some start-up macro was trying to do something malicious, so macros were disabled. No idea where that came from. But it worked.
Why would a database fail to open, but when I made a copy of it, the copy would open? Weird.
Oh, and confidential to Miscreant Corporation: Thanks for nothing, jackasses.
Why is it that when I have trouble connecting to the internet, one of the solutions is “Would you like us to search online for a solution?”(or words to that effect.)
In true Windows - and Charlie Brown - fashion, this [thread=617769]has been done before[/thread].
It actually said it found a solution to one a few weeks ago - though it has been happening very sporadically for two years. It updated a driver. Now, it hasn’t been long enough to know if the solution actually fixes the problem - though it is close to the one I found when I searched, but was to lazy to do anything about. So it is maybe a half success.
[Danny Vermin]
Windows found a solution for me once. Once.
[/Vermin]
In all of my grey-bearded years, Windows did come back with a solution when it suggested that a hard drive about to die. Granted, it’s “solution” was “buy a new hard drive you cheapskate” but it ended up being the correct one.
That gives it about a .001 batting average in my experience.
Yes, I’ve gotten it many times, and it has always been accurate.
And in every case it was my network connectivity. Either Comcast hiccuped, or I forgot to plug in my ethernet cable, or my router was broken.
Is there any way to keep Windows from doing this when a program crashes? I’ve got Windows 7 Home Premium.