A crash dump is a file that captures the state of the system when a problem occurs. The engineers at Trihedral are able to use this file to determine what caused the problem to occur, and therefore what can be done to fix it.

There are several ways to create a crash dump each of which is described in the following sections:

•    You can use the Source Debugger applicationto generate a snapshot of a running process on command.  This snapshot is referred to as a crash dump, even though the process is has not actually terminated.

•    You can configure Dr. Watson on Windows XP™  to create a post mortem crash dump at the moment that an application fails.

•    You can use the Problem Reports and Solutions tool in  Windows Vista™  to retrieve the crash dump file that was generated when an application fails.