Dr. Watson-- User.dmp--395MB!!!

Whats the story with this User.dmp file? Its taking up 10% of my primary partition. I assume I can just delete it but whats its purpose.

Its in the \documents and set..\All Users\documents\DrWatson directory.

Do I delete it and forget about it? Is this file in some way useful? Or is it just taking up valuable space?

 

Dr. Watson, the Windows NT default system debugger, takes a snapshot of the process space when a user-mode program crashes and saves it as (usually) user.dmp.

There are certain rare cases when the file is useful but nearly always only to a high-level microsoft support tech.

And even when they need the file, they nearly always want the most current crash/dump information.

So IMO it isn't worth having Dr. Watson running and creating a crash-dump information file most of the time. If I start having lots of crashes and can't figure out why, I will then let the good doctor create one.

 

I don't see Dr. Watson in the list of services. How do I turn it off?

 

start~help~dr should pop up the help info for Dr Watson. All you ever wanted to know is there and a bit more besides.

 

AHhhh yes.

The help database. I should have been able to figure that out