Technical Support
Contents
Support Plans
Standard, no-charge support is available electronically through our Support Forums (see below). We also offer a paid support option which includes automatic upgrades and support by private email or telephone. For complete details on all support options, including plans currently offered and support terms and conditions, see our web site at https://jpsoft.com/.
Before you contact Technical Support, please review the What Information do we need? section which outlines the basic data we need to best address your questions and concerns.
The primary venue for Technical Support is via our free online Support Forums, where our support personnel can read and respond to your messages, and other users can participate in and benefit from the exchange. The Forums are a lively community frequented by a number of experienced and helpful users. JP Software representatives read every Forum message and respond as promptly as reasonably possible whenever appropriate.
If you have any kind of Internet access, even if only email, chances are you can use the Forums which we make accessible as a mailing list and a set of web pages. Forum members must provide a valid email address and a full name to be able to post, but you do need not need to join or provide any information to simply visit or search the Forum. For complete details and direct access links see the support area of our web site at https://jpsoft.com/.
A number of other support resources are available from our web site, including documentation files, technical tips and discussions, other technical information, and links to other sites. We update this information regularly, and we encourage you to check the Technical Support area of the web site to see if the information there will address any questions you have.
If you are unable to gain access to the forum, or you need to include confidential information in your support request, contact us via email at [email protected] and we will assist you in resolving the problem with forum access, or assist you with your request privately if appropriate. Please do not use that address for standard support questions which can be posted on the forum.
If you are a paid support customer you should use the online Support Forums for routine questions. To create a private support incident refer to the materials sent to you with your subscription for contact information, or email [email protected] and include your support ID (mail to this address may not be answered if it does not include a valid support ID).
Before contacting us for support, please check this help file and other documentation for answers to your question. If you can't find what you need, try the Index. If you're having trouble getting Take Command to run properly, review the information on Error Messages, and look through the Support Forum for any last-minute information.
If you need help with sales, ordering, registration keys, or other similar non-technical issues please contact our Sales and Customer Service department. Technical Support will not be able to assist you with those matters. Conversely, Customer Service is not equipped to answer your technical questions. See Contacting JP Software for our addresses.
Regardless of how you contact us for support, we can do a much better job of assisting you if you can give us some basic information, separate from your interpretations of or conclusions about the problem. Remember that we know NOTHING about your system or configuration unless you tell us, and we can't always make accurate guesses if you don't. The first four items listed below are essential for us to be able to understand and assist you with your problem:
•What environment are you working in? This includes the operating system version you are using, the version of the JP Software product involved, and related information such as network connections and the name and version number of any other software which appears to be involved in the problem. Use the VER /R command to determine the Take Command version and operating system version. This item is essential! Every question posted on the Forum should include a brief identification such as "Take Command 29.0.10 under Windows 10 x64" or something similar.
•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. In most cases, posting the exact command line(s) giving you trouble is the simplest approach.
•What did you expect to happen? Tell us the result you expected from the command or operation in question, so that we understand what you are trying to do. Something that seems "obvious" to you might not be so to others. For example, tell us "I was expecting the file name to be in upper case" or a similar brief explanation.
•What actually happened? 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? Don't simply tell us "it didn't work". For example, if you were expecting output from a command and saw none, at least tell us that much.
•Briefly, what techniques did you use to try to resolve the problem? What results did you get? One technique that tends to solve many problems is to review the help for the command or feature in question and try it with the documented exact correct syntax, as opposed to some undocumented alternative.
•If the problem seems related to startup and configuration issues, what are the contents of any startup files you use (such as TCSTART or TCEXIT, and the .INI file), any batch files they call, and any alias or environment variable files they load?
•Can you repeat the problem or does it occur randomly? If it's random, does it seem related to the programs you're using when the problem occurs? Random or occasional problems are very difficult to diagnose. Do your best to determine some sort of pattern or sequence of events that triggers the problem. If you can't reproduce it, chances are we won't be able to either. Note that mysterious unexplainable problems often permanently disappear after simply reloading the program or even truenameing the system.
•If Take Command, TCC. or the IDE experience an unrecoverable failure, they will save the error information to tcmd.log, tcc.log, and ide.log files that contain the error info (including the file name, function, and line number of the error). The log files will be created in the installation directory if it is writeable (i.e. not in "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)). If not, they will be in c:\users\<username>\appdata\local\jpsoft.