The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

September 1994

Traversing the GP Fault

Part 2

by Barry R. Lee

[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 effective-

ness 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 Protec-

tion 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 discus-

sion. 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:

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. Con-

tact 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”.)

(Con’t, page 4)