Searching the Windows Vista Knowledge base

It is not obvious but did you know that you can search the Windows Vista Knowledge Base (aka KB) directly from within the Windows Help and How-To site?

No? well I don’t blame you as it is quite hard to discover!

First you have to click the little black triangle next to the search box, which then leads to a fly out where you can then select ‘Windows Vista Knowledge Base’ instead of the content on the Windows Help and How-to site.

Now that you have found out about this little hidden (not intentionally) feature you may be wondering, so what? or what is the difference between the 2?

The way I like to think of how what distinguishes the 2 different searches is as follows:

• Search Windows Help and How-To for answers to questions on how to get the best from Windows, demos, tutorials, guides, common questions etc
• Search the KB for technical issues and error messages, hardware related, downloads etc and give more detail about symptoms, causes and how to fix

However there is content such as common error messages where we try on the Windows Help and How-To site put a less technical and more consumer friendly view on it vs the KB article which tends to be more technically written and targeted at a wider audience. Such as about error 80070003

Windows Update error 8007003 Vs Error message when you try to download updates from Windows Update on a computer that is running Windows Vista: "Error 0x80070003 The system cannot find the path specified"

The other thing to remember about the support Kb is that it is not just for Vista but for all our products.

Rob

Technorati Tags: Windows Vista, Knowledge Base, Help and How-To