What is "Windows XP SP2 Customer Support Diagnostic Tools"?

Windows XP Service Pack 2 Customer Support Diagnostics Tools (English) is on
the MSDN subdcribers download site. What is it? The description given isn't
very helpful.

If you need help from PSS then they may ask you to use some of those tools

At least, that's my understanding of it

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"Dennis Grinberg" <dgrin_bli_luef@bli_luef.bellatlantic.net> wrote in
message news:eLa3jn%23fEHA.644@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
> Windows XP Service Pack 2 Customer Support Diagnostics Tools (English) is
on
> the MSDN subdcribers download site. What is it? The description given
isn't
> very helpful.
>
>

The short answer is: If you have to ask, you don't need it.

But if you really, really want an explanation... Essentially, this provides
symbolic debugging tools along with the debug symbols for the SP2 build of
Windows XP. Symbols are basically human-readable labels for binary addresses
and values. They are generated during compile and link of low-level
programming like in C, assembler, and machine language. In the absense of
symbols, you'd typically be staring at hex dumps with no context, until your
eyes fall out. The symbols for XP are commonly used in 2 situations:

1. They can be used in the debugging/testing of device drivers. Typically,
however, device driver programmers would get them from the DDK rather than
from this disc.

2. They can be used for troubleshooting of ultra-critical apps/systems. It's
hard to explain what I mean by ultra-critical because everybody thinks
they've got "mission-critical" stuff, and everybody likes to use the word
"enterprise," but there are probably less than 0.00001% of all Windows
systems in the world where a blue-screen or protection fault needs to get
properly debugged even if it means analyzing a 2GB full memory dump or
tracing thru low-level opcodes, because there simply is no choice. For the
other 99.99999% of us who run into problems we can't solve, we typically
click around for a while, screw with the registry, then give up and
reinstall everything. Or we might give up on an old app/driver and upgrade
it to the latest version from the vendor. Or we finally decide to get rid of
an old piece of hardware and replace it with a newer equivalent. Or we'd
find some other workaround, thru trial & error and/or Google which gets us
past the problem. Some people might even resort to leaving Windows for a
different OS, or performing a task manually. It's not that the tough
problems couldn't eventually be figured out, just that most people in most
situations aren't willing/able to do whatever it might take, especially if
there are "good enough" options available. But there are some situations in
the world where there are no workarounds good enough, and thus PSS sometimes
resorts to symbolic debugging. I have never heard of this happening with
anyone except Premier Support accounts (typically very large organizations)
and even then it is rare.

With Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, certain businesses, governments,
academic institutions, and even individuals (MVPs) have access to Windows
source code which would theoretically make symbolic debugging
practical/useful for them to perform themselves without PSS assistance, but
again we're talking about a very limited percentage of the entire
Windows-using population.

In this particular case, you're asking about Windows XP, but there are
Customer Support Diagnostics discs for all NT-based OS releases and service
packs. In typical corporate environments, ultra-critical processing would
probably tend to happen more on server OS products, but there are deployment
scenarios and distributed app architectures where the client machine can be
key. Field agents and catastrophe adjusters in the insurance industry come
to mind as examples.

Note that there are some low-level debugging tools which PSS can have you
use, without you needing to have the Customer Support Diagnostics, so we're
really talking about narrow, unusual circumstances when you might need this
disc.



"Dennis Grinberg" <dgrin_bli_luef@bli_luef.bellatlantic.net> wrote in
message news:eLa3jn%23fEHA.644@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
> Windows XP Service Pack 2 Customer Support Diagnostics Tools (English) is
> on the MSDN subdcribers download site. What is it? The description given
> isn't very helpful.