Did you know that your Windows XP computer has a hard working program debugger working for you round the clock? This hard working utility is called Dr. Watson. Dr. Watson runs automatically and kicks into high gear when he detects a problem with one of your programs.

You’ll see Dr. Watson in the form of a gray dialogue box that notifies you of a program error before shutting down the program.

While it may be frustrating to have your program shut down in the middle of a project, it’s a far better than the alternative, a full blown system crash. In fact, prior to Dr. Watson, program errors would crash the entire system, causing users to lose unsaved data in all open programs and having to reboot the computer.

Not only does Dr. Watson notify you of a program error, he generates a report you can view or send to Microsoft for further assistance. He also records the errors in an error log that you can view or printout for your computer guy to decipher. To view the error log, you must go through Windows Explorer and find the drwtsn32.log file. It’s located in: Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\DrWatson.

Once you click on the log file, a text editor such as Notepad or WordPad will open and display the contents. Each error is listed in chronological order and they can be quite lengthy. You can scroll down to the last entry of you can search by hitting control + F (for find) and entering the date of the error. You can also search by entering control + F and the word “when”. This is because the word “when” precedes each dated entry. This is an easy way to go from error to error.

The data that Dr. Watson records is highly technical but it does give you an idea of what programs are consistently causing errors and what the errors are. While the errors have “exception codes” and names that may be meaningless, you can use the codes to further your search for answers. Simply enter the exception code into Google or some other search engine and you’ll find a wealth of information about your problem. The code could simply mean you’ve run low on memory which is easily solved with a memory upgrade.

In addition, the report lists all running tasks and processes at the time of the problem.

The Microsoft knowledge base on their website is also a good spot to find out more about the Dr. Watson errors you are getting as are the particular manufacturers of the program that is crashing.

You can run Dr. Watson at any time by clicking on the Start button, then run and typing in “drwatson” and clicking OK. A box will appear on your taskbar. When you click the Dr. Watson box on your taskbar, he’ll check for errors and let you know if any are found. If not, he’ll display a box that says, “No faults detected”. You can close the Dr. Watson box by right clicking on it and choosing “close”.

Like Sherlock Holmes’s trusty sidekick, Dr. Watson, this utility offers clues but doesn’t actually solve the problem. It’s up to you or your computer guy to take the clues and figure out the solution.

We recommend trying the Free Regcure scanner to see of your errors originate in the Windows Registry, as they most often do!

Related: What is Dr. Watson?