While many of you might be stumped as to what a Dr. Watson error is, it is actually relatively commonplace within the environment of computers and systems. Dr. Watson is the name given to a diagnostic and debugging program that comes with Microsoft Windows, a program that is used to detect, log and decode all and any errors within the runtime environment of Windows and the operating systems within it.

Dr Watson pops up when Windows programs run and there is a debug error, which means that the very structure of the code of the program has been identified as faulty or is running in conflict with the operating system itself. While not a very advanced tool in itself, it is quite an adequate tool when it comes to debugging and finding out the problems behind various forms of crashes and interruptions when running programs in Windows.

If you do get a lot of errors when running Windows or any Windows based programs, then it is a good idea for you to run the Dr Watson tool to determine the root cause of the problem or even log a report so you can investigate further. By itself, using Dr Watson alone is not enough, as the applications of its matrix are quite general and it is not a highly specific software that can tackle anything more than a simple debug. It is the first step however, as using Dr. Watson can help you to pinpoint which program, which source or even which code is flawed, so that you're able to use other “fix-it” programs to rectify the problem.

If you are wondering where to find the logs of the doc himself, all it takes is a simple search of the drwstn32.log or user.dump, which can be found in the documents and settings folder in your C drive. One important note when using the Dr. Watson utility is that determining the exact cause of the problem amidst the complex matrix of Windows is a tedious task, one that you have to be careful with because it's quite possible for you to inadvertently alter critical system files, which might lead to a system crash.

You will need other software that has enough delicate touch to deal with such problems. Considering the fact that a good majority of such errors are caused by flaws within the system registry, you should download a registry cleaner so that the program is able to delve deep into the matrix of your computer and sort the null values, bad code, conflicts, orphan keys, or other registry-related errors that might have been affecting your computer.

A registry cleaner is by far more superior than Dr. Watson because of its functionalities. While Dr. Watson is mostly a diagnostic tool, a registry cleaner does what its name sets itself out to be. It literally cleans the system registry, going through each piece of code, each command line, and figuring out what goes where, and what should be in specific places.

If Dr. Watson is the General Practitioner who diagnoses your computer of whatever illnesses it may have contracted, then a registry cleaner would be the surgeon whose delicate hands are capable of fixing your computer's brain from the inside out.