Wednesday, July 15, 2009

annother MS rave

Seems I'm on a Microsoft-bash roll.
I guess this is a trivial thing, but it drives me batty (which isn't as much of a drive as a putt, but that's another issue).

On Windows 2008 server (... note.. the "server" part of that?) all application errrors open up cute little pop up boxes that say really helpful things like "program stopped working, click the button to stop it". And *they* *just* *sit* *there*.

remember the "server" part? Why on earth would anyone want a server poping up little useless error messages to a console that probably doesn't even have a monitor attached to it?
Do they really expect us to pay an operations person to sit on a stool in the server room and watch for the boxes to make sure they get cleared in a timely manner?
What's more, the pop-ups don't even have any options. It's not like the old famous "abort, retry error". It's just "abort".

On a PC? maybe. On a *server*? I think the guys in Redmond need more Starbucks.

And it gets better. How do you stop them from popping up each time? It's a registry setting. Not a check box on the pop up ("click here to prevent this meaningless, stupid action in the future"). No, not a control panel button. No, it's a registry setting that you need to add.

Isn't that splendid?

the MSDN thread is here:

but the correct key is:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\DontShowUI

Even better, this has to be added as a new key with a default value set to 0. Mahvalous.

/end rant

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