Windows 7 – Problem Steps Recorder
The Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) is one of the cool, but hidden, features of Windows 7. If you ever had to offer technical support to a computer user, you probably know how hard it can be for them to describe the problem clearly. The Problem Steps Recorder is the tool that will save you from wasting your precious time as it allows the user to record the steps to reproduce the problem.
What the tool actually does is taking a screenshot after any mouse click or key stroke, add some technical information and wrap it all up in a zipped MTHML report page. This report page can afterwards be shared with the person performing the technical support who can either view the report as is, or as a slideshow.
Here you can find an example report in which I try to save a read-only file.
To start the Problem Steps Recorder, type and select “psr.exe” or “Problem Steps Recorder” in the Windows 7 start menu.
Managing FSRM by using PowerShell
While setting up a new file server based on Windows Server 2008 I decided to use the File Server Resource Manager (FSRM in short) to apply a quota to the user’s private folder. Although for the moment there a no more than 20 users and I could easily configure this via the GUI, I spent some time figuring out how I could script this by using PowerShell
Step 1: Create a new COM object of type fsrm.fsrmquotamanager
> $qm = New-Object -com Fsrm.FsrmQuotaManager
Step 2: Create a new quota object
> $quota = $qm.CreateQuota("c:\fileserver\user1")
Step 3: Set the quota properties
> $quota.QuotaLimit = 200mb
Step 4: Commit the quota object
> $quota.Commit()
This code could then be used within a loop to set the quota settings on all user’s folders.
Instead of specifying the quota properties every time, you could as well create a Quota Template via the GUI (might be tough to configure the template via PowerShell) and apply this to the user folders.
Step 1: Create a new COM object of type fsrm.fsrmQuotaManager and fsrm.fsrmQuotaTemplateManager
> $qm = New-Object -com Fsrm.FsrmQuotaManager
> $qtm = New-Object -com Fsrm.FsrmQuotaTemplateManager
Step 2: Create a new quota object
> $quota = $qm.CreateQuota("c:\fileserver\user1")
Step 3: Get a list of the existing quota templates
> $qtm.EnumTemplates()
Step 4: Apply a specific quota template
> $quota.ApplyTemplate("name of the template")
Step 5: Commit the quota object
> $quota.Commit()