19th June 2001
Doctor, Doctor, give me the news... raise your hand if you've seen those application errors that spew forth some tripe about creating a log file. Aha! Looks like everyone in the room. I must have a thousand of those mysterious log files sitting on my hard drive right now, but I have yet to use them for their intended purpose: troubleshooting problems. Before you tune out (or change the channel), I'd encourage you to find all the .LOG files on your hard drive. If they haven't been updated in a while, perhaps it MAY be safe to remove them -- or move them to another (safe) folder. In the end, you could free up several megabytes of space. Now, back to the tip. Dr. Watson is responsible for trapping application errors and logging the appropriate information to a file named USER.DMP. The doc stores these files in any number of locations (depending on your version of Windows). Unless you're particularly skilled with true propeller-head troubleshooting procedures, this information will be pretty useless to you other than to inform you that an application bombed, which you already knew. That said, these files can be safely deleted. Again, use the Windows Find / Search feature to locate the log lard.
For you NT/2k users, when a STOP error occurs, even LARGER dump files can be created; they, too, are not worth much to anyone not certified to wear a beanie. Windows NT does not have the ability to customize the size of the log file, dumping everything in the C:\ WINNT \ System32 \ Memory.dmp file by default. Windows 2000 also uses the same location and file name for large memory dumps, but by default, workstations are configured to create mini dump files that are located in the C:\ WINNT \ Minidump folder . Each of these is only 64KB in size -- versus the larger versions which can reach hundreds of megabytes apiece (depending on the amount of RAM installed). Still looking for ways to regain space on your hard drive? When was the last time you checked your TEMP directory? Uh huh. I thought so.