Some people seem to have an insatiable appetite for all sorts of esoteric knowledge. They’ll tell you the capitals of all African countries without pausing for breath. They’ll give you the maiden names of all US First Ladies, in proper chronological order. They’ll even recite the first fifty digits of the value of Pi without batting an eyelid. But even these people are stumped when you ask them the meanings of Windows error codes.

“Error code 39″, your computer tells you and then keeps looking at you smugly. So you know the error code, now go figure out what it means.

It seems the Windows team at Microsoft Inc. tried very hard to cover up for all the bugs they left in the system, and buried the truth about them in a secret language known only to insiders.

Indeed, what should you do knowing exactly how your Windows is broken? It isn’t as if you can do anything about it. At least, not in most cases, unless it’s something as simple as memory shortage, which you can (hopefully) fix by adding more RAM to the system.

Still, if you’re one of those insatiable types, getting to know these things can give you a warm, fuzzy feeling along the insides of your stomach.

It wasn’t an easy task until recently. You certainly weren’t going to buy a pricey reference book just to satisfy your unholy curiosity, or to take it down from the shelf and thumb through it every time you get an Windows error code, which is quite often if your Windows experience is anything like mine.

But now there’s Error Messages for Windows. No, this isn’t a new, improved version of Windows error codes. It’s just a tool for deciphering the error codes. To be frank, it’s little more than a pre-compiled list of Windows error codes, with a nice graphical window slapped onto its face. There are these two boxes, big and little. You enter the error code number in the little one, and the big box immediately shows you its meaning.

You enter 28. “The printer is out of paper”, says Error Messages for Windows, EMW for short. And to think that you needed a program to tell you that! It certainly would have been easier to look at the printer, eh?

You enter 38. “You have reached the end of the life”, EMW tells you. Uh-oh. What did you do to deserve that? Look again, it’s ‘file’ not ‘life’. You can start breathing again now.

And so on and so forth. The perfect little program to allow you to sit down with your loved one and spend countless instructive evenings, learning your Windows error codes. To add to the fun, the query window has the picture of a funny-looking wizard, complete with wand and moon-and-stars gown. On top of it all, it’s a free program, so check it out.