Copy Error Messages To Clipboard

What’s the first thing you do when you see a baffling error message in Windows? If you are anything like me you’ll pick out the keywords and look it up on Google. That’s fine when it’s something simple but all too often error messages are long-winded and contain lots of gibberish, which are a pain to type into the search box The temptation, is to try and copy and paste the message, but you will find that this doesn’t work as you can’t highlight the words in an error box, but there is another way. 

 

Here’s a nifty little tweak that I came across the other day on Asp.net. From Windows 2k onwards you have been able to copy the text in error messages to the Windows Clipboard by pressing Ctrl + C, but Microsoft forgot to tell anyone. So the next time you get an indecipherable error message, just press Ctrl + C then open Notepad, WordPad, Word etc and press Ctrl + V, then you can highlight the text, and use it to search for a solution.