Easily Get Help With All Your PC Problems

Knowing your way round a computer should be a gift but sometimes it feels like a curse when someone asks for your help whenever something goes wrong with their PC.

If you've got the time to help someone, this isn't usually a problem. What is a problem is when you're speaking to this person on the phone and you can't quite figure out what's wrong because they're having difficulty explaining it, and because you can't see what's happening on their screen.

In a stroke of genius design, there's an amazing feature built into Windows 7 and 8 that could be the solution. Problem Steps Recorder records what's happening on the desktop and saves it as screenshots to send to the person who wants to help you. That person can then tell you what to do to fix the problem.

#1 Start capturing
The easiest way of finding the Problem Steps Recorder is to type the name into the Start menu and click on 'Record steps' to reproduce a problem to open it. A small window then opens, with the recording controls. From here you can click on 'Start record'to begin your own recording.

#2 Go through the problem
Once you've begun your recording you need to simulate the problem you're experiencing. Every time you click your mouse, the recorder takes a screenshot, so be careful with your trigger finger. If you're not sure whether recording has started, you should see a flashing prompt at the top of the window.

#3 Take a break
Going through the problem steps might take longer than you expected, so if you need to go away from your computer at any time during the recording, just click on the 'Pause' button. When you come back to your PC, you can begin recording again by clicking on the 'Resume record' button.

#4 Add more detail
Screenshots of your problem will hopefully be descriptive enough to tell the person that's helping you exactly what's wrong, but there's no harm in having more info. Problem Steps Recorder lets you focus in on a problem area and add a comment. Just click Add comment', highlight an area, type a comment and click'OK'.

#5 More steps
By default, Problem Steps Recorder only captures 25 shots, so if the problem you're experiencing is quite lengthy, you might want to increase the amount. Click on the down arrow next to the help icon, click'Settings' and update the number of recent screen captures to store. You can take a maximum of 100 screenshots.

#6 Save your problem
Once you've finished going through the steps of your problem, save the recording so you can send it to the person who is going to help you. Click on 'Stop record and when prompted, give the recording a name and choose somewhere to save it to. It will be saved as a zip file, which can be opened by anyone.

#7 Send it to a friend
Now you've saved the file, you're ready to send it. You can attach the file you saved to an email through your email program. Alternatively, click the down arrow next to the help icon, click 'Send to email recipient' and it will automatically attach the last recorded file in a new email using your default email program.

#8 Problem sorted
Now that the helpful recipient has your recorded problem, all they need to do is open the zip file, double-click the problem file and it'll open in an Internet browser window, displaying each of the problem steps. As the problem opens in their browser, they can be using any version of Windows.