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  • Windows Troubleshooter

    From Sylvia Else@21:1/5 to All on Thu Nov 10 20:32:45 2022
    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

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Adrian Caspersz@21:1/5 to Sylvia Else on Thu Nov 10 12:25:09 2022
    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

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Sylvia Else@21:1/5 to Adrian Caspersz on Fri Nov 11 15:05:31 2022
    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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Sylvia Else@21:1/5 to Sylvia Else on Sat Nov 12 12:59:11 2022
    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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Anssi Saari@21:1/5 to Sylvia Else on Mon Nov 14 08:58:26 2022
    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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Sylvia Else@21:1/5 to Sylvia Else on Wed Nov 16 08:59:55 2022
    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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)