Windows 8 Bible

Researching Application Errors

Many software errors provide hexadecimal memory locations in their error messages. Sometimes, searching for the number won’t do any good. The title bar may provide some clues as to exactly what caused the problem. Look through the error messages for some unique keywords that you can enter into different support search engines.

Searching for a combination of the program name and keywords from the error message text can sometimes provide clues. You may want to start with a narrow search, such as http://support.microsoft.com, to avoid getting too many hits. If that doesn’t work, you can broaden the search to all of Microsoft.com (www.bing.com). If all else fails, you can search all five billion (or so) pages in Google’s index at www.google.com.

But the key thing, in all searches, is to get the most unique words from the message into your search string. For example, if searching for the hexadecimal memory addresses from the error message doesn’t return useful results, you could try a combination of other words. If you keep getting results that are clearly not germane, such as pages about UNIX system problems when you’re searching for a Windows issue, preface the keyword you want exclude with a minus sign. For example, searching Google using Windows 8 backup restore –UNIX -Linux returns for a list of pages that contain the words Windows, 8, backup, and restore, but not pages that also include the words UNIX or Linux.

Ideally, you’ll want to try to dig ...