Software - GPF Saver (Crash Analyzer)

This product is targeted towards tech support centers and software developers that deploy software at remote locations or various distributed locations where the diagnosis of the application in most of the cases can not be done at the target location.

Once installed, GPF Saver will start automatically when an exception is raised by a process and not handled, either by the process itself or a debugger, in case the application is being debugged.

Exception Information - This section contains information about the exception raised at the moment of the failure. The contents of the stack, call stack, thread context, and disassembled code around the Program Counter( PC ) are recorded in this section the GPF file. With this information and the MAPFILES, it should be possible to determine the exact location in code where the exception has occurred, as well as the sequence of function calls and parameters leading to the location of the problem.

Process Information - This section contains information about the specific process where the error was encountered. The information includes, number of threads in the process as well as information on other modules used by the process ( such as DLLs and OCXs ). The version information on associated modules may point to problems caused by incompatible versions of DLLs installed on the target machine. This usually happens when the DLLs are overwritten by another application installed subsequently.

System Information - This section contains information about the overall state of the system, such as time, hardware configuration, global memory status, number of processes and threads running, etc.

The GPF file ( organized internally as a COM Structured Storage ) has three major areas of information:

The information saved by GPF Saver can be used by technical support groups to diagnose a problem ( from now on called "GPF file" ) and the developer can be spared from analyzing every problem.

It is an extremely useful tool when the error occurs at a remote location where a developer usually has no way to be present to debug the problem, as well as in cases where target machine does not contain the symbolic information required to diagnose the problem.

GPF Saver for Windows NT is an application error debugger( AEDebug ), i.e. a program that detects catastrophic application errors, and saves a snapshot of the system when the error occurred. The information saved can be used for diagnosing the error at a later time.

One of the dreaded message that pops up on the screen is the General Protection Fault (GPF) message. Users all over the world run into this message quite often especially with new software installed on their system. A lot of times the information that is shown on the screen is not of much use to the average user and usually they end up rebooting the system or calling the technical support of the application that they were running. It makes a lot of sense to find out the exact cause of these errors for it could translate to savings in technical support for companies developing these applications. But this is not an easy process, as a lot of information is needed from the end user. The information needed include the hardware configuration, the processes or applications loaded in memory etc. This information is a bit difficult to obtain from the end user and more often than not it is difficult to remember what applications were running when the General Protection Fault occurred. The GPF Saver helps in solving this problem.

GPF Saver (Crash Analyzer)