Introduction

    I decided to do a windows problem solver for the rule based system. This system deal with general windows problems. It attempts to guide the user through steps so that in the end the system would enable the user to solve the problem. I tried to design the system such that even a novice user would be able to use this system to solve a problem in windows. However, this system does not deal with any of the networking problems or some of the more complex problems. Further more this problem solver can only help a person using windows98.
    For this system I used my self as the expert. I attempted to transfer the knowledge I gained trouble shooting windows throughout out the years to this rule based system.

Background and Reference

    Windows trouble shooting background info

    When trouble shooting problems that come up in windows, the types of problems can be divided in to several sub-catogaries.
 

•     Problems with hardware devices under windows.
Although windows98 automatically detects new hardware devices and installs them, there are times when the devices stop working or wont be detected by windows. When a new hardware device is not detected under windows it is possible to try and force windows to detect new hardware by running AddRemove programs under the windows control-panel. If this fails the user can take the hardware device out and try re-install it. If windows still doesn't detect the device it normally means that the device is malfunctioning or that it is incompatible with the current computer.
•     Error messages on windows startup stating that files are missing in the win.ini, system.ini or registry.
The solution to this problem is pretty simple. The user has to search through the win.ini, system.ini or registry and delete all occurrences of that file. If  still this doesn't fix the problem it means that the file that is missing is a windows system file. In this case the user would be required to re-install windows.
•  A windows component such as "plus!" doesn't exist or doesn't work anymore.
If a component stops working, the user needs to go to addremove programs in the control panel and uninstall the component that stopped working. Then the user needs to re-install the component again using addremove programs.
• Windows freezes during startup.
Windows freezes during startup because there is either a hardware conflicts or one of the programs or drivers loaded during     startup becomes corrupt. If it is the hardware I need to re-install the hardware device. If it is the software the user needs to find what the corrupt file is and delete it from the windows startup.
References

In this case the only references that I had to go by were the help files and faqs available at the www.microsoft.com. They do have kind of a rule based system available that uses HTML. According to the chosen option it goes to a web page.
 

    I use the CLIPS forward chaining to implement this solver. For each step of the problem solving I add a fact according to the users response. Then according to the data that the user entered, a fact is asserted and according to that  a rule is fired. This is the basic approach I took towards implementing this rule based system.
    The system starts by displaying the main problem categories. Once the user chooses a category the user is asked to follow instructions and then is asked question on how well the system reacted. Then according to the answers the user is asked some more questions and given more instructions. Finally if the system cannot fix the problem it tells the user either the device is burned contact device manufacturer, the problem cannot be fixed re-install windows or is asked to contact windows tech support.
 
 

Code

To run this code, from CLIPS command line type

CLIPS> (load file_path\file_name)

CLIPS> (reset)

CLIPS> (run)

It only runs once so you will need to reset and run if you want to do it more than once.

Sample Run

Possible Errors
If this solver was given any  problem outside its knowledge base It would not be able to sovle the problem or would possibley give the wrong answer. Since I put most of the knowledge I have in to this solver I was not able to figure out an error sittuation.
 

Limitations and Future Improvements

    Limitations

    Unlike many of the systems I have seen this system doesn't give a wrong answer. Instead it is how well the system can help the user without having the user replace a device or re-install windows. However since windows has many errors that come up pretty frequently it is difficult to put all the errors in this system. Therefore the limitations of the system are as follows:
 

• Does not handle any errors that are unknown.
• The instructions that are given would be confusing to a novice user.
• Does not tell the user how to fix hardware conflicts, instead asks the user to contact tech support.
• Does not handle problems with networking and network settings.
• In some of the cases this problem solver advises the user to re-install windows as the last resort, this does not always work.

•   Integrate the clips with a nice GUI and show the instruction with easy to understand graphics.
•   Expand the rules to handle networking problems.