If I kill Dr. Watson, will anything break?

(and schred his two log files)

No doubt people have noticed in windows update how keen M$ is on enabling error reporting logs. Somehow this encourages me to do the opposite. I know there are O/S experts out there who are involuntarily shaking after reading these words.

Fact: I never use the logs.

Fact: I don't have any benevolent geek friends who come over and fix my computer.

Fact: A quick glance at the contents of the Dr. Watson logs reveals everything and nothing. Everything about my computer, o/s and software, including my security programs, to whoever is clever enough to suck this unencrypted text file out of my computer. Nothing to me, an average run of the mill computer user.

So....Will anything break if I deactivate Dr. Watson and burn his books?


-HandsOff

 

Hi HandsOff,

I can't find any compelling reason not to disable it. You can always reenable it if you want to investigate a crash that you can duplicate: scroll down to the section on Dr Watson. Rather than disable it, I just block it with Process Guard.

Nick

 

No Problemo. Not a single complaint from WXP since Nov 2001.

 

Hi guys -

Sorry I did not get back to you. Things have gotten a bit out of hand on this end lately.

Anyway Nick S, you say "I just handle it with process guard" That sounds a little like "I just used a sliderule to calculate the value of pi to 100 decimal places" which is to say, i am intimidated by its complexity, and if it worked as good as DCS says, then how come everyone isn't using it?

Nod32_9, I while back a friend of mine amazed me by saying that he has had absoluty no problems with his computer. Then he started it up, and there was this big ad covering a third of his screen. i said whats that? he said, oh nothing. thats been there for months. i've gotten used to it. Just kidding! What was your way of deactivating it, if you remember. By the way, In the past I have had my firewall block it. that's right...

"calling M$ Mother Ship, Dr. Watson here! We just scored big! It's HandsOff little black book complete with names, numbers, and everything"

- HandsOff

 

If you want to disable Dr. Watson program errors from generating log files:

Start Regedit
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion\ AeDebug
Set the string Auto=0 (1 is on...default setting)
To re-enable it, run drwtsn32 -i

 

Did that thing in, a long time ago.



snowbound

 

Nod32_9:
Thanks for the information, I will act upon it with all due speed!

Snowbound:
Glad to know you had success with it!


- HandsOff

 

a nice simple application is safexp http://www.theorica.tk/ although it may not deal with all the bits n peices you may wish to disable , it is a safe way of disabling many of them

 

Hi SPC-

I think I tried SafeXP a while back and felt it was a little over my head. I use XP-Antispy which has pretty good explanations for the controls of XP's settings, however, I don't think it has a control for Dr. Watson.

I should look at SafeXP again sometime because it was a while ago when I tried it. The registry edit was painless enough. I believe the problem is solved!


- HandsOff