I bought a Dell Precision 7760 refurbished from Amazon. 128GB RAM at a deep discount. The built-in camera didn’t work on arrival. But 128GB!
I have a Mac but wanted native Windows for testing SQL Server 2025 and recording demos. I’m developing courseware (stay tuned) and needed a solid Windows machine. The external camera I already had worked fine with it. The specs looked good. I kept it.
The Camtasia Problem
Camtasia stuttered whenever I hit record. Mouse disappearing. Slow. Stalls. Multiple support interactions got nowhere. I tried different settings, updated drivers, changed hardware acceleration. Nothing worked.
I pulled out Process Monitor from Sysinternals. It captures everything happening on your system in real time. File access, registry changes, process activity. I let it run while reproducing the issue, then exported the log.
The log file had hundreds of thousands of events from just 2 minutes of capture.
Claude Code + Process Monitor
I opened Claude Code in my terminal and explained the situation. Claude Code is a command-line tool that (very recently) uses Claude Sonnet 4.5 for debugging tasks. It asked me to convert the Process Monitor log to CSV.
It found several leads. Windows Defender wasn’t excluding Camtasia’s intermediate files during recording. I added those exclusions. Outdated drivers that not even Dell’s driver portal found. I updated them. Claude Code walked me through other troubleshooting steps to rule out software causes.
None of it fixed the stuttering. But deeper in the logs were failure calls. Lots of them. The pattern pointed to hardware problems, possibly with driver issues still in the mix. Made sense for a refurbished machine someone already returned.
As an aside: Claude Code also critiqued Camtasia’s design choices. I found that amusing to hear its barely contained shade. Won’t elaborate here but it was spooky and funny at the same time.
Return to Sender
Yesterday the refurb started hard crashing. Random freezes. Restarts. I packed it up and returned it. Hoping to get my money back.
The Process Monitor and Claude Code combination worked well. Claude Code parsed through the log files and spotted patterns. It helped me work through elimination methodically. Add exclusions, test. Update drivers, test. Check for failure patterns. Each step ruled something out.
I didn’t get a software fix, but I got clarity. The laptop had hardware issues from the start. Now I’m looking at other options, but I’ll use this approach again.
If you’re dealing with performance issues support can’t solve, Process Monitor generates detailed logs that Claude Code (once in CSV) can analyze for concrete next steps. For weird system issues, this combination helps figure out if you’re chasing software problems or should just return the hardware.
DBA Use Cases?
Jury’s out. I’d like to explore a few things… Claude Code analysis of stack dumps from crashes, error logs, perfmon output, XEvents. Point it at the data, explain the symptoms, and see how good it may be. Hallucinations? Finding the actual needle in the haystack? Adding this to my list to explore and will share.
Streamlabs OBS is far less annoying than Camtasia as long as you don’t need to do a bunch of editing.
What I particularly dislike about Camtasia is that there’s no video preview while recording so you can’t tell if anything weird is happening with the green screen effect.