How To Isolate Your Problem Area

This document contains very important steps that you should take whenever you are experiencing problems with Collect! These steps should be taken before you call Collect! Technical Services. Many problems are not what they appear to be. Because of this, certain preliminary steps must be taken to try to resolve problems that you encounter. If your problem still persists after you have tried the basic solutions, please address the issue to Collect! Technical Services.

Please note the results you get when you troubleshoot as indicated below. We will ask for these results when you phone Collect! Technical Services. These preliminary tests are necessary. We may refer you back to this document to troubleshoot.

1. Restart Your Computer

Most problems are easily corrected.

1. Exit from all programs and turn off your computer.

2. Restart the computer.


3. Try doing what you did before.

If the particular problem you encountered is fixed, then the problem was an anomaly in your system. You should check your computer configuration if erratic behavior continues.

2. Run Maintenance

Run a maintenance on your database to make sure there are no errors.

If a hardware problem is corrupting your database, it will continue to do so even after you repair the damage by running maintenance. However, this is an essential first step. Before ANY other solution is considered, you must run maintenance.

3. Be Prepared When You Call Collect! Technical Services

When you call, you should be at your computer with Collect! running and the help documentation at hand.

We may ask you to bring up a particular screen or perform certain steps in Collect! so please ask for help only when you are able to follow along in the actual Collect! program.

Be prepared to give the following information:

1. The version and build of your Collect! application.

What version of Collect! are you running? Please pull down the Help menu at the top right of the Collect! screen and choose About. You will see the Version and Build that you are running displayed at the top of the box About Collect!

2. The path to the instance of Collect! that you are currently running. This is also in the Help menu, About option. When the information about Collect! is displayed, look at the bottom of the dialog for "exe path:" and "db path:".

3. The type of computer you are using, including network system.

4. The operating environment that you are using.

5. The exact wording of any messages that appeared on your screen. Find these in the Application Log. This may be accessed through the System menu. Choose Diagnostics, Application Log. Many choices exist for filtering the log to only show the messages you need to review.

6. A description of what happened and what you were doing when the problem occurred.

7. How you tried to solve the problem.

Summary

Although these steps may seem tedious and frustrating when you are experiencing difficulties, they are truly the only way to get to the bottom of the problem. In the long run, this saves you and Comtech a great deal of time and effort. The practice of troubleshooting your problems also helps you to become more effective in maintaining the integrity of your database and, hence, your business operations.