What's a good app for analyzing crashes?

I could use something that will tell me just what it is that's just caused a crash. Anyone know of something effective that doesn't take a Microsoft engineer to understand?

And by 'crash', I don't mean the sort that causes a reboot or a BSOD, I mean the annoying, irksome type that brings up the 'Nya nya nya, I'm gonna tell Uncle Bill about this!', message.

Not that I keep Error Reporting enabled, but you know what I mean.....

 

Thanks for responding Broni, but I'm afraid I find your reply a little simplistic.

I mean, using Google is what we all do when we want information, but when we want more specific help, we join forums like this and try and help each other out with the harder questions.

 

How would you describe Dr.Watson?

 

I think what he really wants is a way to see is any errors information that is leading up to the crashes. Of course I may be totally wrong.

Anyway, if this is what you need or will help ... If you have WinXP/2000, you can use the event viewer tool. This doesn't show absolutely everything but it may give you and idea depending on the problem.

You can get to it a few ways...at least.

1.Right click my computer, select manage;
1a., under System Tools, there should be Event Viewer. Under that should be Application, Security, System. Click on one and you can browse through the listings here and see all sorts of errors or just informational messages.

2.Click on start, run, type this in 'compmgmt.msc' and press enter then follow instructions for 1a above.

3. Go to control panel, administrative tools, and double click on the 'Computer management' icon and follow instructions for 1a above.

Good luck

Also, there are system monitoring tools out there that can monitor processes ,memory, file useage, etc...,. Microsoft bought out SysInternals which has some useful and free software here that may help if you need to go further.

 

LostUser, thanks very much. Your response contains exactly the sort of constructive information that I was looking for.

You are correct when you say, "I think what he really wants is a way to see is any errors information that is leading up to the crashes "

I guess my choice of terminology wasn't quite precise enough to suit everyone