Microsoft Weekly

Copy and share troubleshooting details

By Ed Bott

In Windows 10, opening Task Manager and clicking the Performance tab gives you a useful view of your PC's overall performance. Click each tab to see real-time graphs of resource usage by your CPU, memory, storage devices, network adapters, and graphics adapter. In addition, each tab shows details about hardware, such as the driver version number for your graphics adapter and the number of slots in use by memory modules.

So how do you share that information with someone else? The not -so-obvious answer is to use the Windows Clipboard. Select a tab and press Ctrl+C to copy the most relevant details from that tab to the Clipboard. You can paste the results into an email exchange with a support engineer or as part of a feedback report.

This isn't the only place where the Clipboard is useful for capturing system details. Open the System Information utility (Msinfo32.exe) and press Ctrl+A to highlight the contents of the System Summary tab, then press Ctrl+C to copy those details.

Finally, there's Reliability Monitor, which records details of Windows events ranging from successful software installations to critical errors. Double-click any event to see its details, and then click Copy To Clipboard.

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