Windows Error Reporting (WER) captures software crash and hang data from Windows systems. The data is sent to Microsoft for analysis. The data captured by WER is used to identify those bugs that are affecting customers the most. Fixing those bugs benefits the whole Windows user community.
WER is an optional configuration during the installation of Windows and some other Microsoft products.
How can you tell if WER is configured on your machines?
Windows 8/2012 has a PowerShell module for working with WER configuration.
£> Get-Command -Module WindowsErrorReporting | select Name
You can view the current WER configuration:
£> Get-WindowsErrorReporting
Enabled
You can disable WER:
£> Disable-WindowsErrorReporting
True
£> Get-WindowsErrorReporting
Disabled
And you can enable WER:
£> Enable-WindowsErrorReporting
True
£> Get-WindowsErrorReporting
Enabled
These cmdlets are only available on Windows 8/2012 and above. The module is labelled as a script module but it is actually loaded as a dll so its unlikely to be portable to legacy versions of Windows.