How do I use DR. Watson?

In a lot of the answers for common problems. I see reference to Dr. Watson. I know this is a utility that comes with Windows. Is there a tutorial out there that I could use to gain incite?

 

I suppose Windows Help would be the place to begin. Here's a clip from there:

Using Dr. WatsonDr. Watson detects information about system and program failures and records the information in a log file. In the event of a program error, Dr. Watson starts automatically.

Open Dr. Watson.

Notes

To open Dr. Watson, click Start, and then click Run. In the Open box, type drwtsn32.
Dr. Watson cannot prevent errors from occurring, but the information recorded in the log file can be used by technical support personnel to diagnose the problem.
For information about using Dr. Watson, click Help in Dr. Watson.
For more information, click Related Topics.

 

DrWatson is a JIT debugger, 'Just In Time'. When a program crashes, rather than just exit with no information on why it happens, Windows will invoke the JIT debugger to take a snapshot of the process for post-mortem analysis. These pop out as USER.DMP files or such. It doesnt have a lot of options or features to play with, its really there just to write out dumps when stuff breaks.

 

OLDSALTY--I am not sure why WinXP even has DrWatson anymore.
You can get info on errors from Control Panel|Administrative Tools|Event Viewer. When you right click|Properties on an Error in Event Viewer, you are often are led to a Website with considerable info on the problem.
If you look into DrWatson.log, you will find what to me is an overkill of information about an error, which really is not too helpful to anyone but the most sophisticated.