Recently, I blogged about the Windows Snipping Tool and how convenient it is for grabbing a copy of all or part of a screen. This is fine for normal purposes, when everything is behaving normally . . .

A dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death).
This happened to a client of mine last week. She valiantly tried to write down the gobbledeygook she saw on the BSOD and the screens that showed on re-boot, but I was unable to persuade Dell Technical Support that these suggested we’d got a hardware problem. The “PC Check” software that was installed on the machine gave the system a clean bill of health so Dell insisted that it must be a software problem and that the only thing to do was re-install everything from scratch.
I wasn’t at all convinced that it was a software problem. It wasn’t consistent, and I had already re-installed the driver (software that manages hardware) that related to the hardware mentioned in the error message. I had also looked elsewhere for possible causes. Nevertheless, we decided to follow Dell’s advice and re-install.

Photograph of the first screen after the BSOD
Smartphones are great for this situation because they make it very easy to email a picture. You could do it with an ordinary digital camera but then you’d have to upload the pictures to a computer and attach them to an email (which would be impossible, of course, if you only have one computer and it’s currently very poorly). You just need to take a reasonable amount of care when taking the picture so that any text on the screen will be legible in the photograph.
So, this was a lot of words to explain something very simple, but I think it’s worth it because it could often make a fraught experience a little easier. I’m not suggesting you should always have a camera at the ready next to your computer, but if you should remember this trick when a problem arises, it might make computer support from the likes of Dell a lot easier. It might also help when you wish me to support you with computer problems. I’d certainly be happy to try it and neither digital photos nor emails cost anything!