GEGeek's How to Articles

02/2008  -  Microsoft "Guided Help" Programs

There's a relatively unknown service that Microsoft provides to help solve user's common issues called "Guided Help".

I plan to introduce you to it today and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. It's been out about a year as far as I can tell,

yet many have never heard of it. After a conversation with my friend about it I thought it was a good time to write about it.

I've never really trusted it and I sort of like to do my own modifications. So I guess I've always avoided it. But today I was

determined to turn my PC over to Microsoft. God help me.

Quote from Microsoft

Guided Help is a program that you can download from some Microsoft Knowledge Base articles. Depending on the task,

Guided Help can automatically perform the task that is described in the article, or Guided Help can guide you through the

steps to perform the task yourself.

Wow, did you get that? Let me review it with you. You have an issue. You search the MS Knowledge Database for your answer.

You find it. You start reading about what it is you have to do to fix the problem. You're not really sure that you feel comfortable

performing these tasks on your system. Well Microsoft then provides help at this point. They provide a file for you to download

that will either step you through graphically using your system or do it for you. That's right, do it for you. How cool is that?

Typical Scenario To Follow Along With

Let's start with something simple. So let's pick "How to perform disk error checking in Windows XP".

Note:

You can follow along if you like by downloading the guided help file from the site: >>>>>  Guided Help Database

Once you are at the page and find the "How to perform disk error checking in Windows XP" listing click on it. At first you are

disappointed because the same old Microsoft step by step instructions are displayed. Ah, scroll down a bit and you'll see a message

like the one below indicating that Guided Help is available for this issue.

Guided Help to check the hard disk for errors

So I click on the link and proceeded to download the .exe file to my downloads directory. I then closed all my open

windows and navigated to the downloads directory to run the .exe file.

This is the first screen you will see:

Just to test it out I selected "Another Computer". Here's the next screen I saw.

Not bad I thought. So I cancelled out and restarted the program again so I could select "This Computer".

When I did that here's what I saw next.

WOW !!!!!   You impressed yet? Well, I was starting to get impressed, if it would work right. It might screw

up my computer, then what good is it. So being the cautious guy that I am, I select "Show Me" first.

It then proceeded to take me through a graphical step by step procedure of how to check my drives.

It was an impressive tutorial. Maybe my expectations with MS are just so low that I'm easy to impress.

I'll leave it to you to download the file and step through the tutorial. I don't want to ruin it for you.

Next I decided to let it try and check my drives for me. Gulp! Here goes nothing.

It worked!

It goes through the same tutorial, stopping along the way whenever there was a decision to be made to let

me choose such things as which drive to check, to fix or not fix errors, etc...  Wow.

There are over 200 Guided Help Files, not that MS had a hard time finding any issues for their Guided Help program. :)

I'm beginning to think It might not be bad idea to download a bunch of the more serious ones, like recovering

from a corrupted registry, and having them on CD or USB drive for safe keeping at a later date.

I haven't tested the more serious ones out yet and I'm not about to do so on my production PC. But this

might warrant powering up the old backup PC and see just how well they perform. Microsoft could be on

to something here. I'm definitely going to start downloading more of these and start testing them out.

Maybe MS should come out with an ISO of the whole collection. Alright, we're losing our heads here.

Hope this helps or informs.

Hope this was informative

GEGeek