Two Tips For Maintaining Your System In Top Form

Years ago, whenever I built a new system I used to dream of the day I’d have it “finished.” You know: everything finally installed, configured, customized, tweaked and fine-tuned… so I could just sit back and enjoy the software. These days I realize that’s just a pipe dream. Systems are by their very nature perpetual works-in-progress.

Resignation to that reality has been both liberating and productive in that it has resulted in several innovations that help me maintain my systems in top form — easily and for very little money. Two of the ways I do this are by maintaining: 1) a library of all the error messages I receive, and 2) a chronological record of most of the changes I make to my system.

The key to making these strategies work is ease of use. In the old days I used streaming tape to back up my hard drive, 250MB at a time over a dozen cassettes and hours of painstaking effort. In those days — despite better intentions — I only ever backed up my system twice, maybe three times a year. Now that I use an isolated secondary drive to image my data I can back up individual partitions in as little as ten minutes, which — because of the speed and simplicity of that exercise — I do no less than every couple of days. The fact is that if you could snap your fingers or twitch your nose to create backups of your data at a point in time you’d be snappin’ and twitchin’ several times a day.

Besides regular backups there are other maintenance activities which can be, at the very least, invaluable in helping you keep your system running smoothly and with the least amount of effort.

While the resources to perform these tasks are readily available on any system, the acquisition of a few additional applications will allow you to perform them even more quickly and easily — ensuring that you’ll actually do them as a matter of routine.

Maintain a library of all the error messages you receive.

How many times have you been asked by a customer support technician, “Exactly what was the error message you got when the program failed?”? Call me cynical but as often as not I suspect they’re hoping you won’t have a clue… so they can move on to the next frustrating caller in their queue, or maybe go on break. Wouldn’t it be gratifying to be able to give them the exact text of the error message in question, complete with (if any were given) exit codes and memory addresses? And wouldn’t it be just as valuable to have a permanent record of all the different error messages you’ve received from a particular application over time for yourself?

You can. Here’s how…

1. Maintain a set of folders — one for each application for which you receive any kind of error message, organized under a parent folder named “Problems” or “Error Messages” or something like that. Here’s a partial listing of mine:

2. Whenever you receive an error message (or error) do a “Print Screen” and paste/crop it in a bitmap editor or, easier still, capture it with a screen capture utility like SnagIt, available at TechSmith. Here are some typical examples…

3. Save this bitmap/message to its corresponding folder with a filename prefixed by the date and time on which it occurred. I use this naming convention so that when the files in each folder are sorted by Name they appear in the chronological order in which I encountered them.

The date format I use to prefix these filenames is “YYYY.MM-DD (time).” The reason for using this particular date format is the same as for prefixing the filename with the date: it keeps the files listed in each folder in their precise chronological order of occurrence. Here, for example, are the names I assigned to the four bitmap/message files above:

2005.09-20 (0345) o Titlebar displays both active & inactive colors.png

2006.08-02 (1502) o An error occurred trying to rename a file (aimemb.dll).png

2006.08-25 (1130) o Adobe Acrobat 6.0-6.1 Update Error 1334 ”The file ‘PreflightLib.dll1′ cannot be installed… ”.png

2006.09-28 (1711) o EM ”An error occurred trying to replace… clipc.exe” attempting to update 2.9 to 3.0.png

As I’ve said, the key to making such procedures feasible is the ease and speed with which they’re accomplished. In order to facilitate this date/time-prefixed file naming I use an inexpensive scripting program called KeyText, to which I’ve assigned a keyboard shortcut which automatically supplies this date/time and the “bullet” character (Alt+NumKeypad7) which separates it from the alpha description. That script is…

{Date “yyyy.MM-dd”} ({Date “HHmm”}) o

NOTE 1: This script — and indeed the KeyText program itself — has useful applications far beyond this error message documenting procedure. If you’re not a programmer but would like to exercise programmer-like control over your operating system and applications I highly recommend KeyText.(1)

NOTE 2: Using SnagIt and the KeyText auto-dating script I mentioned I’m able to save a screenshot to its corresponding folder in about twenty seconds. Using Windows-resident resources would take about twice that long, I suspect.

As of this writing I’ve amassed a library of nearly five-hundred error messages like the ones above. (I’ve been collecting them since the Win9x days.) If you reference these error messages by name in the System Tweaks procedure described below along with the steps you took to resolve the issue, it can be an invaluable source of information in the event you encounter the same problem again in the future.

Maintain a chronological record of all major changes you make to your system.

Systems are highly dynamic, especially so for the power user. From the installation or removal of programs and expansion devices to updating the operating system, applications, drivers, and codecs to the adjustment of security settings and software configuration options, systems are in a constant state of flux. But even the most experienced user can’t know with certainty the repercussions of every change he makes to his system. Something that worked a certain way yesterday might not work the same way tomorrow, if indeed it works at all.

After years of maintaining systems I finally came to the realization that the importance of documenting system changes ranges somewhere between invaluable and critical.

Here’s how I do it…

1. Create a plain text file for this purpose and name it. (Mine’s called System Tweaks.txt.)

NOTE 1: You can use Notepad for this but if you haven’t gone looking for a replacement editor before now, now might be a good time. I use an excellent freeware replacement called metapad, but there are lots of them out there.

NOTE 2: The main reason for using a plain ASCII text editor instead of a full-featured word processor is speed; i.e., you’re only gonna do this religiously if it can be done quickly, and word processors are just too slow opening.

2. Create an easily accessible shortcut to this file.

3. When the file opens add your entry at the top of the document, specifying the date (and time) of the change.

I’ve created another KeyText script which automatically adds a very nice header/separator including the date and time above the last entry. That script is…

[cr/blank line]
__________________________________________________
{Date “yyyy.MM-dd”} ({Date “HHmm”})
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
[cr/blank line]
{Up}

… where [cr/blank line] is just a “carriage returned blank line” with nothing on it.

Here’s an example of some of my entries…

With the most recent entries at the top of the document you have easy access to the tweaks most likely to have recently impacted your system in ways you might need to investigate, while you can easily search the entire document for keywords when the file becomes so massive you lose track of what you might have done, and when.

NOTE 1: Referencing screenshots of error messages you’ve catalogued in the last suggestion along with the steps to successful resolution of the issue is a handy way to keep track of the procedure for future reference. For example, it turned out that the display of both active and inactive titlebar colors in the DownloadStudio Monitor window above (as well as other annoyances) was due to the MS Office task “Ctfmon” running in the background. Documenting the resolution of this problem (referencing this bitmap file as an example) I cited the KB article containing the instructions on how to permanently disable this task in MSConfig, which turned out to be an unusually involved process. If I ever encountered a similar problem on someone else’s system (which I have) refreshing my memory on how to resolve it is a simple matter of searching my System Tweaks file for “ctfmon” or “titlebar.”

BTW: metapad accommodates active links, so a KB article so cited can be accessed from directly within the metapad file.

NOTE 2: Using the referenced KeyText script this procedure takes about ten to fifteen seconds to complete, depending on the length of the note. Again, I’m guessing the same procedure would take about twice that long doing it manually.

Often, reading procedures like the ones I’ve described here makes them sound more cumbersome than they really are in actual practice. Trust me on this: these procedures are a snap to perform. The most difficult part of their implementation is remembering to perform them when you’ve not been in the habit of doing so in the past, but once you’ve conditioned yourself to remember them I can assure you the day will come that your documentation efforts will yield dividends.

Finally, I’d intended to include a third procedure here for maintaining easily accessible, chronological records of all communications with vendors and technicians in individual Word files (by application) but I’ve decided to leave that for a separate article, depending on how well received these suggestions end up being.

(1) I’ve written other scripts (also posted in the KeyText forum) that will allow you to: toggle “Show hidden files and folders” on and off without having to go into Folder Options and locate the radio buttons manually; toggle “Only 1 instance of IrfanView is active” (to allow multiple instances but then turn the feature off easily, before you end up with a taskbar full of buttons); auto-fill address forms, etc. Unfortunately the KeyText forum is offline at present (which is why we’ve included the two scripts in this article, rather than linking to them) but the Web site operator tells me he’s working on having it back up shortly.

[Steve Hobberstad]

[tags]system maintenance, keytext, irfanview, error message[/tags]