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June 14, 2005

Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #12: Copying Windows XP error dialogs

Every so often you're trundling along doing something in Windows XP and all of a sudden, your application crashes with an Unspecified Error and a dialog box filled with gobbledygook. Said gobbledygook sometimes contains an error code in hex (like 0x80346513) and a bunch of other useful diagnostic information. Your face turns several shades paler. It is time to call Microsoft Support at $2.79 a minute with a $35 minimum charge. You can be sure they won't charge you just the minimum, though. With the money you would eventually spend, you could probably have gotten considerably more satisfactory *ahem* service on your friendly neighborhood 1-900 party line.

So you decide to post to Usenet (Note: Usenet? Usenet is part of the Googleplex. It has always been part of the Googleplex. It has always been known only as Google Groups.) Painstakingly you write down every digit in the horrendous HRESULT you got, as well as every other hex digit Windows spewed back at you. Little do you know that you've transposed two digits in the HRESULT and it's going to seem like an entirely different error to the trolls that troll Use^H^H^HGoogle Groups for nubile users like yourself.

Wouldn't it be great if you didn't need to write down anything by hand? Well, fear not, genuinely useful help from Windows XP is at hand!

Click on any dialog box. When it is the active window, hit Ctrl+C. Open Notepad or your favorite text editor and hit the Paste command, usually Ctrl+V. Voila! The contents of the dialog box are pasted into your text editor. It even draws cute lines for the borders of the dialog box. I did the Ctrl+C trick on a dialog box and this is what I got.

---------------------------

Notepad

---------------------------

The text in the Untitled file has changed.


Do you want to save the changes?

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Yes   No   Cancel   

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Look familiar? I only wish this worked for BSODs as well. Oh well, maybe in Longhorn!

This has been a presentation of the World's Largest Repository of Useless Knowledge. Heck, this factoid may even prove useful to you one day.

Posted by Vishy at June 14, 2005 09:55 PM

Comments

Posted by: the nav at June 15, 2005 02:58 PM