This diagnostic tool helps to solve program failures. It will provide a report of technical information for manufacturers' support staff trying to cure an application that crashes – you will be asked for a Dr. Watson report if it is required.

Dr. Watson can also offer pointers on problems, and technically competent users may be able to glean useful information from a Dr. Watson report. Having said that, don't hold out much hope of Dr. Watson leading you directly to a cure.

When you run Dr. Watson, an icon will appear in the system tray (the area on the right-hand end of the task bar). Right-click on it to bring up a context menu.

Suppose a program crashes regularly. Run Dr. Watson and wait for it to happen again. In many cases, when Dr. Watson is running, it will spot the failure happening and write technical information to a log file in \WINDOWS\DRWATSON. Logs have the filename extension .WLG. You can load them into Dr. Watson and see its diagnosis. Here is an example:

Although the program that failed has been identified, there is nothing to suggest what to do next. Turning on Advanced View from the View menu gives extra tabs in this dialog, among which is this:

For the programmer of the failed application there is a wealth of detailed information here, but for the rest of us it might as well be written in one of those curly-wurly foreign scripts. All you can do is send the log file to the manufacturer and cross your fingers. The information on the other tabs may sometimes help experienced users spot odd symptoms, but Dr. Watson isn't a magic wand and it is of limited direct help to most people. Worth a go if you haven't any better ideas, though.