Dr. Watson Postmortem Debugger

[BigZam]

Can someone please explain to me what this is? And is it harmful?

[Slater]

sounds like a program that monitors your system and identifies program crashes and records details about it... but I'm not sure.

[shooraijin]

I don't know about XP, but Dr Watson is a built-in part of Windows since at least 3.1, and maybe earlier. It's the internal debugger and is written by Microsoft, so it's supposed to be there.

[BigZam]

ok good cuz an error notice kept coming up for it and the computer would freeze, and it would scare the crap outta me cuz if i mess up this computer, i am in it deep.

[Slater]

do you get an error report from it?

[BigZam]

do you get an error report from it?

yeah. every once in awhile when i try to open My Computer it will say "windows has encountered a problem and needs to close" and sometimes after that an error report will come up for Dr. Watson and then the computer will freeze.

[blkmage]

I remember when I was a kid getting into all of this computer stuff and I thought Dr. Watson was like Norton - an antivirus. I remember the confusion it spawned when it just asked me for details about the crash.

[Slater]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;308538