Silicon Shecky

The case of the mysterious stopping spooler has been solved. At least this time.

Good old Microsoft. You send in errors, look up errors and can not find anything from Microsoft itself. Half the time the people in the Technet Forums treat people with almost a snark to them, and don’t listen. Canned answers, no answers, and worst of all no information.

I recently had one of those spooler.exe keeps stopping problems. Went through all the logs, did my Internet searches and came up with an answer. c:\windows\system32\spooler\print needed to be cleaned out. Simple answer, which I found archived from a forum question about 4 years ago. Not an official Microsoft forums mind you, just a general IT forum.I find more things away from Microsoft than on their site.

It is frustrating. I am sure all of you have run into something similar. You look in the event logs and there is the “Click here for more information” link in the error message. Of course 99% of the time when you click on that link, the more information is sorry, we have no information on that error. The rest of the time it is just a general description that already has been stated inside the log entry.

Why does Microsoft tease us so? They have the perfect mechanism to help us, the ones who support their products, and yet they shun us. Yes there is a lot of other information out on the net, but sometimes you run into errors that you can’t find anyone else who has solved the error. Sometimes you want that information from Microsoft, without having to call them up and use an incident or pay for an incident. Last time I called up Microsoft, I had the problem figured out while on hold because the Microsoft Technician was asking for help. He couldn’t find information on the error codes.

Microsoft wants to be a big name in search. They have the perfect mechanism to help take Google down a peg with the links in the error log entries. Why they don’t get that working properly, I have no clue.

I figure what a decent way to start off the week with some links to some tips, tricks, and news.

First off is the news that Microsoft’s Free E-book Offer is back. Starting this Wednesday, April 15 and going through April 22, you can download 2 books from Microsoft Press, completely free. The more interesting one to myself is the Windows 2008 Small Business Administrator’s Companion.

Keeping on the Windows 2008 track Microsoft’s Technet Blogs have decided that this months weekly tip series is on Windows Server 2008. Week 1 and Week 2 have been posted and I have to admit, this is some real good information. Some of it seems quite simple, but as I’ve said before, how many times have you stupidly overlooked like the simple? I know I do quite often.

Finally it seems that the economy has hit the SMB Summit this year. Susan Bradley has more information at her blog, or you can just go to the SMBTN Blog. I say go and check out Susan’s blog anyways as she always has interesting posts with some good information.

And that is it for this Monday morning. More to come during the week, as I get to delve into the idea of 1:1 computing for schools.