Repair Troublesome Computer Problems with Microsoft Fix Its

Having a weird problem with your computer? Good luck getting it figured out; without your own IT department, you will have to determine if it's a hardware problem or software problem, and then try to narrow it down to a Windows glitch or trouble with some other program. For its part, Microsoft has thousands of knowledge base articles, but they can be difficult to follow. Thankfully, all that just got a little easier thanks to Fix Its, which automatically solve problems for you.

A small but growing number of knowledge base articles (over a hundred at the moment) are being converted into Fix Its. These topics can still be performed the old, manual way -- read the article, follow the steps, get confused, and so on -- or automatically, in which you simply click a button and wait while the Fix It resolves the problem on its own.

Does it work? Microsoft claims that over 75,000 customers have used Fix Its so far, with over 95 percent of them reporting the problem solved. You can scan the list of available Fix Its at the Fix It blog or the Help and Support Fix It site. I suggest the latter, since there you can see all the business-oriented Fix Its divided into categories, like Exchange Server, Office 2003, Office Communicator, Outlook, and Windows.

Dave Johnson was employed by Microsoft Corporation at the time this article was written.