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BOOT CAMP 108
HELP ME WATSON…
Sherlock Holmes’s worthy companion Dr. Watson might seem
like an odd choice of name for a little known Windows trouble-shooting utility
but like its namesake, its special talent is gathering evidence of foul deeds… In
PC parlance they’re known as general protection faults or GPFs, dastardly crimes
committed by malevolent computer programs carrying out illegal operations that usually
result in the dreaded ‘blue screen of death’. Dr. Watson is known in the trade
as an application error debugger and it is designed to investigate problems,
stepping in at the moment a crash occurs, making a detailed record of what your
PC was up to at the time it happened.
Unlike other types of PC maintenance programs or tools Dr
Watson cannot prevent a crash or help you to recover lost data, instead the
information it collects can be used to diagnose, and occasionally indicate a
solution to a recurrent software fault, and whilst the data it generates may
not mean much to you, it can be sent to manufacturer’s technical support staff
and the people who wrote the programs, to help them fix the problem or suggest
a remedy. It can be especially useful on reproducible faults, where Windows or a
program crashes after a particular sequence of events.
Microsoft has included Dr. Watson in Windows since Version 3
but you’re unlikely to have come across it, especially if you’re using Windows 95,
as it wasn’t in all releases. However, it does appear in most versions of
Windows NT and Windows 98, which is what we’ll be concerning ourselves with in
this week’s Boot Camp. Part of the reason for it’s intermittent inclusion in
Windows is that it has never been fully developed and can, in some
circumstances, actually cause GPFs of its own, however if you have a
troublesome machine, and all else has failed, it is definitely worth trying.
The program is very well hidden in Windows 98, it can be
found by going to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools >
System Information, and you’ll see it listed on the Tools menu. It not enabled
by default, so the first task is to get it up and running on your machine. The
simplest method is to type ‘drwatson.exe’ (minus the quotation marks of course)
in Run on the Start menu. Immediately you’ll see a new icon pop up in the
System Tray, next to the clock display on the Task Bar. However, it makes sense
to have Dr. Watson running in the background, constantly monitoring your PC. To
do that you’ll have to create a shortcut and include it in your Start Up folder
so that it launches every time you boot up your machine. It’s quite
straightforward, go to the Start button, select Programs, double-click on the
Start-Up icon and an Explorer window will open. Next, go to the File menu,
select New then Shortcut and the Create Shortcut dialogue box opens. In the
Command Line field type ‘drwatson.exe’, then Next, accept the default name and
click on the Finish button. Alternatively go to Start > Settings >
Taskbar & Start Menu, select the Start Menu Programs tab. Click the Add
button then Browse and find DrWatson.exe in the Windows folder, highlight and
click Open, then Next. Now select the Start Up folder from the directory tree,
click Next and Finish. In the unlikely event you experience any problems after
Dr. Watson has been installed simply highlight the icon in the Start Up folder
and remove it by pressing the delete key.
From now on each time your machine suffers a GPF Dr. Watson intercepts
the crash and takes a ‘snapshot’ of your system. It identifies the program
responsible and the nature of the fault and writes detailed technical information
into a ‘log’ file (extension *.wlg), which is stored on your PC’s hard disc, (in
the Dr. Watson sub-folder in Windows). As an added bonus it gives you the opportunity
to jot down a few notes of your own. This file can then emailed to the
technical support people, or printed out and sent by fax or letter.
When Dr. Watson is running you can get an instant appraisal
of your system by double-clicking on the icon in the System Tray, it takes a snapshot
and a dialogue box appears on the screen in Standard view showing the Diagnosis,
window along with the jotter pad for your notes. This probably won’t tell you
much but if you then go to the View menu and select Advanced you’ll see a row
of tabs that provide much more detailed insights into your system, its
configuration and the software it is running. If you prefer you can have Dr. Watson
always open in the Advanced view by selecting Options on the View menu and
checking the box ‘Open new windows in Advanced view’.
You can save this data by going to the File menu, select
Save and use the Browse button to locate the Dr Watson folder in Windows, give
the file a name (today’s date for example) and click the Save button. It’s
worth doing this straight away, when your machine is operating normally as it
will give you or anyone who’s interested a benchmark to work from.
Dr. Watson is not going to stop Windows from crashing (nothing
will, if it’s a mind to…), but the information it provides is a lot more useful
than the normally meaningless error messages that appear and it just might help
a software sleuth with their deductions.
Next week – Word
2000
JARGON FILTER
GPF
General Protection Fault – a ‘fatal’ software error, causing
a running program to stop working because it fights (and looses) over the
amount of memory resources it and other programs have been allocated by Windows
SNAPSHOT
A compilation of data and statistics about your PC including
details of the operating system, memory resources and status and running
programs
WINDOWS NT
Windows New Technology, highly stable but less well featured
version of the Windows operating system, designed for critical business and
network applications
TOP TIP
If you want to prevent others from using your computer here’s
a wickedly simple little tweak that will not only stop your PC from loading
Windows without your say so, but also frighten anyone who messes around with it
into thinking they’ve damaged your PC!
Go to Find on the Start menu, select Files or Folders and in
the Names field type Win.com (an important file Windows needs to load). Click Find
Now and wait for it to appear in the window below. Click once onto the Win.com
icon and it highlights, wait a second, click again and a cursor appears, wait
another second and click a third time so that the highlight disappears. Now position
the cursor and rename the file to something you will remember (secret.com for
example) and close the Find window. The next time your PC boots up it will
display a scary error message, saying it cannot find Win.com, and the boot sequence
will halt at the C: prompt. All you have to do is type in secret.com and Windows
will continue to load as normal. To return your PC to its former state simply
rename the file to Win.com.
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