LeeTutor's Doing Windows

Home Page

Doing Windows

Windows Tips Categories

Miscellaneous Tips

GETTING DETAILED ERROR MESSAGES IN WINDOWS ME

In an effort, I suppose, to be more "user friendly" -- or at least, less "user unfriendly" -- than previous versions of Windows, Windows Millenium Edition was designed so that you do not see all those confusing register and stack dumps, or module addresses, when an error occurs. You might see this message, for instance:

SPOOL32 has caused an error in <unknown>.
SPOOL32 will now close.

If you continue experiencing problems,
try restarting your computer.

However, experienced users often need more of the kind of detail that was provided in previous versions of Windows, in order to track down the reason for the problem by, for example, searching the Microsoft Knowledge Base on the internet. If the error has just occurred, and you are looking at the error message on the screen, then you can display message details by simultaneously pressing the Alt key and the D key. If the error has already occurred, then you will need to find the file Faultlog.txt in the Windows folder and open it and search for the error. (Use Notepad if it is less than 64 kb, otherwise use Wordpad.)