On the whole I have to say that Windows XP has been extremely reliable. I haven’t yet completely locked up the computer. That type of thing happened all too often with Windows 98. Crashing a piece of software is one thing; taking out the whole computer is another.
With that said, it’s not like I haven’t crashed programs since I switched to XP. I have. And I discovered that in XP, when you crash a program, it asks you if you’d like to send an error report to Microsoft. The message makes it sound like they’ve got hundreds of technicians waiting with bated breath to add your problem to their bug list. (Yes, and by the way, if you believe that, I’d like you to know that the moon is made of green cheese too.)
Anyway, I figure that the odds of Microsoft caring about my particular bug are zero, so I figure the report is just a big waste of time and bandwidth. Since I have a never-ending quest to save time and bandwidth, I turned off the stupid message. Here’s how you do it:
1. Choose Start|Settings|Control Panel.
2. Double click the System icon and click the Advanced tab.
3. Click the Error Reporting button at the bottom right of the dialog box.
4. You can choose to disable error reporting completely or just for certain programs.
5. When you are done, click the OK button.
So now when my software does crash, I don’t have view yet another dialog box. Let’s face it, if the computer is behaving badly, I’m not in a good mood. So the fewer clicks I have to make, the better.