"Dr Watson" is a Windows utility that gets control after certain kinds
of crashes. ("Postmortem" = "after death", from the medical procedure
to determine why a patient died....) It is able to capture the contents
of CPU registers and RAM, and view the machine instructions that led
immediately up to the crash.
Of course, most applications and even most OS components aren't written
directly in machine language, but in some higher-level programming
language that gets turned into machine language using a compiler. Many
compilers include an option to generate an annotated output showing how
each source statement was translated.
IF you had a copy of that annotated output, you could use the
information from Dr. Watson to find where in the program the crash
occurred and understand what it was trying to do. You'd also have
access to possible trade secrets of Microsoft (for the OS) and whoever
wrote the application that crashed. Microsoft has a program to license
much of this information -- for quite substantial amounts of money! --
but most other software makers do not. So the information that Doctor
Watson may have is not really useful to you; if you have a support
contract for the program that actually crashed, it might be useful to
the makers of that program to help them understand what happened.
David Gillett
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [PCSOFT] Dr. Watson postmortem debugger
From: Tensie Palmer <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, March 30, 2010 7:40 pm
To: [log in to unmask]
My husband's computer has begun to act weird. This darned thing Dr.
Watson
Postmortem debugger has stopped him in his tracks. It tells him to
report
to Microsoft the error and then the whole thing freezes up.
Please tell me how to fix this problem for him... ?
Thank you and have a great night!
Tensie
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