Section 6.5. Closing Documents

6.5. Closing Documents

You close a document window just as you'd close any window, as described in Chapter 3: by clicking the close box ( marked by an X) in the upper-right corner of the window, by double-clicking the Control menu spot just to the left of the File menu, or by pressing Alt+F4. If you've done any work to the document since the last time you saved it, Windows offers a "Save changes?" dialog box as a reminder.

UP TO SPEED
Sending an Error Report to Microsoft

Whenever Windows detects that a program has exited, shall we say, eccentrically for example, it froze and you had to terminate ityour PC quietly sends a report back to Microsoft, the mother ship, via the Internet. It provides the company with the technical details about whatever was going on at the moment of the freeze, crash, or premature termination.

The information includes the name and version number of the program, the date and time, and other details. Microsoft swears that it doesn't collect any information about you .

Microsoft says that it has two interests in getting this information. First, it collates the data into gigantic electronic databases, which it then analyzes using special software tools. The idea, of course, is to find trends that emerge from studying hundreds of thousands of such reports . "Oh, my goodness, it looks like people who own both Speak-it Pro 5 and Beekeeper Plus who right-click a document that's currently being printed experience a system lockup ," an engineer might announce one day. By analyzing the system glitches of its customers en masse, the company hopes to pinpoint problems and devise software patches with much greater efficiency than before.

Second, Microsoft's computers may also react to the information on the spot and send you a dialog box that lets you know about an available fix.

Windows XP did this report-sending, too, but it asked you each time a program crashed. In Vista, the report-sending feature is either turned on all the time or off all the time.

To adjust the settings, choose Start Control Panel; click Classic View; open the Problem Reports and Solutions applet. On the left-side task pane, click "Change settings." In the resulting dialog box, click "Advanced settings." There, before you, is the On/Off switch (where it says, "For my programs, problem reporting is:").

This dialog box offers various other privacy controls. For example, you can create a Block listprograms whose crashes won't be reported . (This means you, owners of Music Piracy Plus 4.0.) You can also specify whether crashes are always reported, never reported, or left to the discretion of each account holder.

Finally, you can see a list of the reports it's sent so far; click "View problem history."

Sometimes closing the window also exits the application, and sometimes the application remains running, even with no document windows open. And in a few really bizarre cases, it's possible to exit an application (like Windows Mail) while a document window (an email message) remains open on the screen, lingering and abandoned !