Configuring Dr. Watson

Configuring Dr. Watson For NT4 / Win2000 / WinXP
Dr. Watson is a utility included with Windows that occurs during the crash of a program. We will see how to configure and possibly turn it off.

Dr. Watson is a debugger, and it starts when a program crashes, provides information on the exact cause of the crash, opens a window indicating that a program has crashed, included errors in a log file and in the journal of events.

Dr. Watson is also a dump (a "snapshot") program memory to crash.

If this utility is especially useful internally at Microsoft and for developers, it is possible to configure see to disable it for normal use of Windows, the dump file can weigh several hundred MB over the crashes.

The first thing to do is delete the dump file, which is here:
For Windows NT and 2000:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\DrWatson\user.dmp

For Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Dr Watson

Then, to launch the doctor in question, go to Start, Run ..., and type drwtsn32 then validate OK.

The next window opens:

http://gallery.techarena.in/data/519/drwatson.jpg

"Emptying the symbol table" and "Emptying all contexts of thread used to increase the log file by placing more details about the program to crash.
=> We can therefore remove these cases.

"Add to existing log file" is used, if selected, to record all errors in a single log file. Si elle est décochée, un fichier journal sera crée pour chaque erreur. If it is unchecked, a log file will be created for each error.
=> So let it not checked to see several logs.

The "Notification visual" displays an error message when a program crashes.
=> Unless otherwise be totally indifferent, leave the box checked.

The "Sound notification" allows to issue a beep when a program crashes.
The option "Create a file on emptying incident", despite its name barbaric, simply serves to define whether or not Dr. Watson must create a dump (or "picture") program memory to crash.
=> Uncheck this box, if the dump file will take an astronomical size over the crashes.

The "Clear" can erase the contents of the log file.

To disable the creation of the log file, it must be the "Number of instructions" and "Number of errors to record" to 0.

Finally, to completely disable Dr. Watson during a crash, we have to go to the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug and bring the value chain Auto 0.