What Are Dr. Watson Errors?
Anyone who’s used 32 bit Windows Operating Systems will have occasionally experienced a Dr Watson error – an “Exception” or a “General Protection Fault”. The result of such an error is almost invariably to crash the program that’s generated the error, losing any work in that program. Dr Watson is actually a program that ships within Windows. It’s a type of program called a debugger – it captures data from programs that have suffered certain types of fault, and stores the data in a file. Two versions of the Dr Watson program have shipped with Windows. The older version, drwatson.exe, shipped with Windows NT, and Drwtsn32.exe ships with Windows XP. Both versions of the program capture error data from programs, and write it to a file called Drwtsn32.log. The file is typically written in to the System32 directory. Historically, Dr Watson was originally just called “Watson” – but Dr was soon appended on the front after people thought that the name referred to Sherlock Holmes’s companion.
Anyone who’s used 32 bit Windows Operating Systems will have occasionally experienced a Dr Watson error – an “Exception” or a “General Protection Fault”. The result of such an error is almost invariably to crash the program that’s generated the error, losing any work in that program. Dr Watson is actually a program that ships within Windows. It’s a type of program called a debugger – it captures data from programs that have suffered certain types of fault, and stores the data in a file. Two versions of the Dr Watson program have shipped with Windows. The older version, drwatson.exe, shipped with Windows NT, and Drwtsn32.exe ships with Windows XP. Both versions of the program capture error data from programs, and write it to a file called Drwtsn32.log. The file is typically written in to the System32 directory. Historically, Dr Watson was originally just called “Watson” – but Dr was soon appended on the front after people thought that the name referred to Sherlock Holmes’s companion.
