November 2nd, 2007 @ 7:24 am
NET helpmsg
John R. Durant’s WebLog : NET helpmsg
“Another installation is already in progress. Complete that installation before proceeding with this install.”Cool. The information is there, but not very easily found. What would be better is for Microsoft (us) to surface the information more readily in the UI! I can guarantee my father will never type these commands. Of course, he also would not care about nerding out and discovering the error description either! He’s a genius under the hood of a car though. He’s saved me tons of money and time over the years because of his immense knowledge of automobiles.
I definitely agree that something needs to be done with error messages. Even if there was just a well documented, or in windows help GUI index of what error messages meant it would save so much headache from people.
I have most of the good ones memorized, but still.
1618 = other installation in progress, finish that and try again
1614 = program is uninstalled (useful when uninstalling programs)
1605 = program not installed (slightly different than 1614)
1641 = so far so good with the install, initiating a reboot (Office 2007 got me to use this one)
anything else, especially like errors 1, 2, or 3 can basically be annoying because they can mean anything. How hard is it to say “file not found” or something instead of 2?
5 Responses to “NET helpmsg”
I’m glad to see you are as politely annoyed as I am about this! At Microsoft developers have always had a huge influence on the user experience and interface design. I’m wondering how different things would look and how differently they would function if more UX designers and graphic artists had the largest influence, tempered by other influences such as developers, tester, and project managers. I think that cryptic things like this would far less frequent.
It’s an area where we can improve, I think. Thanks for your helpful post.
By John R. Durant November 2nd, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Cisco does this constantly in our traces and errors. For IOS there are great online decoders for the error messages but for the voice software you’re mostly left with Google.
In our case it’s usually a performance problem. Lets say we want to print an IP in decimal and the program has it stored different ways for different functions. Sometimes reverse hex, sometimes forward hex. Every time we print an IP in a trace line we’d have to go through the code to print it from one data type to the next. You would say negligible impact, but think about an app like ours that can write 10000 trace lines every 20 seconds.
Working on serviceability is a hard and thankless job. I’ve been on it for two years and make progress where I can.. but you can’t win them all.
But anyway.. I definitely agree that needing a “secret decoder ring” makes products unusable from a serviceability standpoint.
By Burns November 6th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
1603 : the worst error message ever. It means “Fatal Error”
Almost all error messages are fatal, so this is about the least helpful of ALL messages ever given.
Recently I have been getting 1603 from McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator, and it really means “please reboot before installing this software” but instead of giving some code that means “please reboot before installing this software” it instead just says “something bad happened”
By justin November 8th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Error messages and serviceabilty…
Justin had some interesting comments on serviceability and error messages:
http://tinfoilsoldier.com/blog/2007/11/02/net-helpmsg/
I run into this crap CONSTANTLY day after day trying to figure out what a certain error message means. Turns out it…
By Jason Burns - IT Superhero November 8th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
[...] and serviceabilty Justin had some interesting comments on serviceability and error messages: http://tinfoilsoldier.com/blog/2007/11/02/net-helpmsg/ I run into this crap CONSTANTLY day after day trying to figure out what a certain error message [...]
By Jason Burns - IT Superhero November 8th, 2007 at 9:06 pm