Dr. Watson 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:
 (August 1998).iso/full/W98Comp/Access/dw1.gif)
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:
 (August 1998).iso/full/W98Comp/Access/dw2.gif)
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.
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