• An online Support Forum accessible via a news reader, a web interface, or as an email list.
• We also offer a Wiki which has a variety of articles about practical uses of our software written primarily by users. You can add to or comment on these articles by registering at the Wiki.

Please use the Support Forum or the Wiki whenever possible. The Support Forum is our primary support venue, and it's where you'll receive the fastest answers. It also allows you to benefit from the experience of other users, and lets them learn from you as well. Since it is a moderated list, it is free from spam, unwarranted advertising, misleading answers, and other common annoyances. The forum archives are fully searchable (from the web interface) and may already contain the answer to your question. To visit or join, see our Support Forum page.

See our Support Forum page for details on how to access our Technical Support mailing list and newsgroup. Barring emergencies, we will respond within one business day, and often much more quickly than that, including nights and weekends.

Note that private email support is not included in the Standard Support Plan. To email us, please use the email form on the contact page

Note that telephone/fax support requires an Extended Support Plan. Technical support by telephone within the US and Canada is handled on a callback basis. If you are not sure if your question requires technical support or need other assistance in addition to your technical questions, please call our main number at 1-800-595-8197. Our office staff will assist you with all of your concerns, including having a technical support representative call you back if necessary. Note that leaving a message on our Support Forum is generally much faster.

We generally return all legitimate technical support calls within 24 hours (weekends and holidays excluded), and most are returned much more quickly, usually on the same business day. If your problem is urgent and requires a faster response, please let us know and we will try to accommodate you. If you contact us by telephone and don't receive a reply within 24 hours, please try again. We probably attempted to return your call and were unable to reach you.

If you have a problem with a batch file or complex alias, please contact us electronically if at all possible. If you do not have electronic access, contact us by fax. Problems of this type are usually very difficult to diagnose over the telephone because we cannot see the material with which you are working. For longer batch files (over about 15 lines), do your best to reproduce the problem in a smaller test file.

If you do need to contact us for support, it helps if you can give us sufficient information to understand your report while keeping your message as concise as reasonably possible. Do not send us extensive configuration files or large batch files unless we specifically ask you to do so.

In general, the necessary data includes references to the following basic information, and the first four items are essential:

1. Which product(s) and operating system are you using? Please be specific, for example: "I'm using Take Command version 8.0 build 96 under Microsoft Windows XP SP2". Typing ver /r at the prompt from any of our products will generally display the required software information.
2. What exactly did you do? A concise description of what steps you must take to make the problem appear is much more useful than a long analysis of what might be happening.
   
3. What went wrong? At what point did the failure occur? If you saw an error message or other important or unusual information on the screen, what exactly did it say? If the problem is that the results of a complex command did not meet your expectations, tell us what those exact expectations were.
   
4. Can you repeat the problem or does it occur randomly? If it's random, does it seem related to the other programs you're using when the problem occurs?
   
5. Briefly, what techniques did you use to try to resolve the problem? What results did you get?
   
6. What are the contents of any startup files you use (such as 4START, 4EXIT, and the .INI file), any batch files they call, and any alias or environment variable files they load?

All our products include a list of common error messages available through the online help system (assigned to the F1 key by default). A recommended course of action is provided for most errors. Error messages relating to files are generally reports of errors returned by the underlying operating system. You may find some of these messages (for example, Access denied) are vague enough that they are not always helpful. Our command processors include the file name in file error messages, but are often unable to determine a more accurate explanation of these errors. The message shown is the best information available based on the error codes returned by the operating system.

The Error Messages likely to be returned by your command processor are documented in your local help files and also available from this site under the Online Web Help's errors topic.

The values returned by the internal _SYSERR variable correspond to very specific conditions determined by Windows. For details, you should consult the technical documentation provided by Microsoft.