On Monday October 3rd 2005 Autodesk launched a change with the shipping AutoCAD 2004, 2005 and 2006 Customer Error Reporting "CER". The CER dialog is displayed after you experience an unscheduled exit of the Autodesk application "crash" for many possible reasons. It does not contain personal information unless you enter it yourself and then it sends technical details of the crash event back to Autodesk where it can be analysed and researched. The change made was that we started alerting customers in the CER that they are using a product that has not been updated to the latest Service Pack level. It happens all to frequently that someone encounters a problems and contacts us about a problem when the issue was fixed in an already existing service pack. Most other applications send the crash reports to Microsoft. All Autodesk products have the CER built in to get the data sent to us so we can research and solve the issues in the Service Packs and next releases of the product. For example the recently released AutoCAD 2006 SP1 addressed many CER reported issues. Please be sure to send in the report and add your contact information and any known steps when you see the CER dialog. It is a perfect way to report a problem direct to Autodesk and get it researched by the actual product development teams.
More posts about the CER:
http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2004/07/cer_reports_ple.html
http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2003/11/your_customer_e.html
Cheers,
Shaan
