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Everything seems to be going well. You have a couple of programs open, and happily going thru your normal computing tasks. After a few minutes, you sit back, aghast – a window suddenly appeared, screaming:

“Application has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Please tell Microsoft about this problem.”

Second place from the Office Assistant, this error reporting "feature" is one of the foulest things known to humankind. It’s beyond me how Microsoft expects anyone to happily click Send Error Report, and believe that they will make Windows a better place.

"But it only appears when a program crashes!" you can almost hear Microsoft explain. Golly wow. And that really never happens.

To those who have also reached the limits of their patience, here is a corking way to disable error reporting:

1. Open your Control Panel.
2. Select System (doubleclick).

   

3. The System Properties window will appear. Select the Advanced tab.
4. Click the Error Reporting button.

   

5. Select Disable Error Reporting. Optionally, you can also check But notify me when Critical Errors Occur.

   

Adios, error reports!

Searching for files in Microsoft Windows XP is a breeze if you’re merely searching by file name. However, if you are using the "A word or phrase in the file" search criterion, the default setting does not work as it did in Microsoft Windows 2000.

The Problem

When you use Windows XP’s search "A word or phrase in the file" search criterion, it will only look into selected document types such as HTML 3.0, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plain text, and MIME. It actually won’t search through other file types such as .php, .cpp, .c, and .log. So, even if the phrase you’re searching for is included in a file called index.php, that file will not be included in the search results.

The Solution

You can use the solution as detailed in Microsoft’s website. Alternatively, you can do the following:

1. Install the latest service pack for Microsoft Windows XP. As of this writing, it is Service Pack 2.
2. Go to Start > Search > For Files or Folders. The Search Results Window should appear.

   

3. In the Search Results Window, select Change Preferences

   

4. Select Without Indexing Service or With Indexing Service (depending on whether this is turned on or off)

   

5. Select Change Indexing Service settings (Advanced). The Indexing Service window should appear.

   

6. On the toolbar of the Indexing Service window, click on the Show/Hide Console Tree icon.

   

7. In the left pane, right click on Indexing Service on Local Machine, and select Properties.

   

8. Check Index files with unknown extensions. Click OK.