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The LA Fox Developer
Newsletter
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September 1994
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[Ed.
Note:
This
article
is the second in a three-part series dealing with General Protection Faults. The author makes no guarantees
as
to the effectiveness of any of the suggestions and is not liable for any damages which may result from implementing these suggestions, because of the technical nature of the following discussion.]
In the first installment of this article, we discussed some of the obvious causes of a General Protection Fault (GPF). In simple terms, a GPF may be thought of as a memory “collision”. The following discussion deals with some of the not-so-obvious reasons behind GPFs. In Part 1, we set up a few simple modifications to the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to make them more “bare bones” and to make the job of hunting down GPFs a little easier. These changes included:
We also discussed the importance of having some sort of system to annotate the changes made to any of the files we’ll be dealing with in this discussion. With these changes in the AUTOEXEC and CON FIG files, remember that when a GPF occurs, it is extremely important to exit from Windows, shut the system down (or reset), reopen Windows, reopen the applicaiton that caused the GPF, and proceed with what you were doing before the error occurred.
Now, for the not-so-obvious things to check against:
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Reconfigure Windows to
run
with its native VGA
driver. Newer applications may be vying for memory space used by your video driver. Which leads us to the next point...
Make
sure that you have the most current video drivers and cards that are appropriate for your system. I’m sure that the video drivers and cards you
used with that 286- or 386-class machine worked just fine, but when you rebuilt/reconfigured your machine to a 486-class, you probably forgot that lapse in time that occurred between configurations when you put that same card/driver on the new motherboard. Contact the card/driver manufacturer to obtain the latest. If you’re lucky, the manufacturer will have a bulletin board and you’ll get the latest and greatest for your card for the mere cost of a phone call. (Trident’s BBS, for example, is (415) 691-1016.)
Activate Dr. Watson and place the file in the “Startup” Windows panel. That’s right, Dr. Watson,
as in Sherlock’s sidekick. Dr. Watson is a utility program buried within the Windows operating system that will maintain a log of system settings and/or programs and files that were active when the GPF occurred. To do this, double-click on the Startup Icon to open it up, select “File” from the Windows menu, and “New” from the pull-down. Click on “Program Item” when the next window opens up, then “OK”. After doing this, another window, “Program Icon Properties”, will open. Enter the following responses in this window:
then click on “OK”. Dr. Watson’s icon appears in the “Start-up” Panel. Close the panel and exit out of Windows. Restart Windows and, voila, Dr. Watson is on the job. (Additional commands can be added to the Dr. Watson startup configuration, depending on what you want the Dr. Watson log to look like. Rather than go into them here, I suggest buying any book on Windows that has more than a paragraph or page on this useful utility.) However, Dr. Watson will not prevent GPFs.. .it will only record some environmental variables that were in place when the GPF occurred. But there are also more sophisticated tools available, reviewed elsewhere in this newsletter. (See, “Three from Landmark”.)
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