My remote customer experiences a bug that I can\'t manage to reproduce, even aft
ID: 656892 • Letter: M
Question
My remote customer experiences a bug that I can't manage to reproduce, even after setting up a machine identical in all points (I think) to my customer's machine.
Is there a program that me and my customer would run and we would be presented with a list of differences?
Differences in OS version
Differences in Windows Update patch level
Differences in installed programs (and their versions)
Bonus for differences in installed DLLs
Bonus for differences in general configuration
Bonus for big differences in hardware/drivers
Requirements:
The list of differences should be easily navigable, so that for instance I can choose to ignore DLLs differences.
Free
Must work for Windows 7 and above
Unfortunately I am not able to connect to the remote PC via VNC or anything, even Skype is prohibited. The remote steps must be performed by the customer, so they have to be extremely simple and reliable.
For now, my lousy idea is to ask the customer to type Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product | Select-Object -Property Name and take a screenshot of Windows Update's View update history then compare manually with mine.
Explanation / Answer
I would not waste time going down this route. I have software I wrote that verifies the current inventory of software installed and versions, and this helps establish the over all environment, but going beyond that is simply chasing rabbits. Even if two machines are made from the same image the dynamic of each machine will soon differ; different users, different processes, different connectivity, etc.
I find Team Viewer the best thing available. I can remote into the user's machine, honoring everything about the user environment and do trial and error. Once I see the error on the user machine I get an idea how to force a similar error. I may use javascript debug messages or vbscript to exercise the machine. I may put debug messages in a web application.
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