The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

July 1994

Traversing the GP Fault (Con't from p.6)

As a final step, before venturing into this territory,

load Windows, and remove any “.TMP” files. This

can be easily accomplished by opening the Win-

dows File Manager, normally found in the “Main”

box. Double-click on the “File Manager” icon.

From there, select “File” (menu), “Search” (menu

choice), and key in *tmP Make sure the “Search

all subdirectories” box is “X’d”. Next, select “OK” to

have the search begin. This is a basic garbage

collection that’s absolutely necessary before

beginning an undertaking of this nature. (Windows

3. 1x, as part of its “nature”, will create these

“.TMP” files any time there is a malfunction within

the OS, such as a GPF.) Once these files have

been identified, delete them.

The previous step can be automated by creating a

subdirectory called TEMP (under C:\) and adding

the following statements to the AUTOEXEC. BAT

file:

and CONFIG.SYS. Windows is a slightly different

story. Fortunately, Windows makes it fairly easy to

identify those statements which load different pro-

grams and drivers by preceding each section of code

with an appropriate note in brackets ([]). These

statements can then be modified with a semi-colon

(“;“) to disable them. For instance, to disable After

Dark, insert the semi-colon at the beginning of the

statement:

Now, for the obvious things to check against:

Remember, after trying each of these steps, it is

important to re-boot your system (so the changes

may take effect), reopen Windows, reopen the

application that was causing the CBPF. and proceed

with what you were doing before the error oc

curred . (Unfortunately, there is no quick and easy

fix for this problem. And since the GPF may be

occurring on an intermittent basis, you’re really not

guaranteed that any changes made will be effec-

tive until hours, or days, later. It’s just the nature of

the beast. Another very hard lesson to be learned,

while the GPF is “alive”, is to periodically save

sections of your work , and not wait till they’re

complete.)

Disable any TSRs. These include menuing sys-

tems (ex., Direct Access), shells, screen savers

(i.e., After Dark), memory managers (ex.,QEMM),

etc. Even the screen saver that’s native to Win-

dows may be suspect. Disabling these programs

is pretty straightforward. In DOS, you can “rem”

out the appropriate statements in AUTOEXEC.BAT

(Con’t, page 8)

Page 7