It's a shame that Microsoft deprecated Steps Recorder (PSR) in Windows

Back in November 2023, Microsoft announced that it is deprecating Steps Recorder, also known as Problem Steps Recorder (PSR), in Windows, adding to the growing list of utilities the company has been slowly phasing out over the years. While PSR was not your everyday tool, it was often a part of workflows where diagnostic information was needed to reproduce or solve a problem on the PC.

For those unaware, PSR basically allowed you to begin a screen recording session, perform your actions to show off or reproduce a problem, and end the recording. The output would be a textual description of all the steps that you performed - such as a mouse click, opening an application, entering text, etc. - relevant screenshots, and some metadata. This output file could then be saved and shared with any person who is troubleshooting a problem with your PC.

Sure, PSR wasn't perfect, because it did not always capture everything you did based on its compatibility with various software and actions, but it was a fairly decent tool used by IT admins and help desk engineers to troubleshoot issues that you were reporting.

To pacify supporters of PSR, Microsoft suggested conventional screen recording alternatives like Snipping Tool, the Xbox Game Bar, and its video editing software Clipchamp.

Given the rise of large language models (LLMs) and AI advancements in general over the past couple of years, I think it's unfortunate that Microsoft decided to prematurely axe PSR. While LLMs aren't perfect either, we have seen how heavily they are being used in many enterprise workflows and consumer activities. A lot of their use cases revolve around understanding problems and then leveraging text generation capabilities in various scenarios such as coding, brainstorming ideas, troubleshooting, writing, and more.

Sure, PSR was a bit of an inconvenient option up until 2023 because it relied heavily on IT engineers reading through lots of text and deciphering screenshots, and at that time, it made sense to just point them towards traditional screen recording software.

But in today's era, I do feel like there would have been a place for PSR, perhaps even with integrated AI capabilities. IT engineers wouldn't have to parse through thousands of words of text; they could just have the AI model generate a summary for them.

And I know most of our readers here absolutely hate AI, so I'm not even talking about AI interfering to the point that it's offering incorrect solutions. Rather, just providing a summary so that support staff does not have to comb through mountains of text.

I do think that is a better alternative than the screen recording options we have on offer today. Because now, Microsoft expects engineers to watch potentially several minutes of video to decipher the reasons behind PC problems.

Of course, engineers can also feed this video to an AI model, but there are multiple problems with that approach, too. Uploading and processing videos takes much longer than parsing text, and secondly, many AI services have usage caps based on how much you are paying for them. Uploading hundreds of videos of PC problems a day across large organizations would consume this capacity much faster than tens of thousands of words of input text.

I guess my overall point is that I think it's unfortunate that Microsoft pulled the trigger on PSR so soon, when it could have made it so much better through integrated AI or even giving customers the option to parse text through their preferred AI models. Screen recording is an OK alternative, but I'd rather just hop on a call with the help desk and screen-share my issue to them rather than having both of us go through the trouble of recording and sending over video content for diagnostic purposes. PSR with AI capabilities would have been a much better middle ground, but it seems the ship has sailed on that front, which is a shame.

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Posted Friday 13 February 2026 at 1:02 pm AEST (my time).

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