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Table Of Contents  CertiGuide to A+ (A+ 4 Real)
 9  Chapter 4: Diagnosing and Troubleshooting in the Windows OS
      9  Less Fatal Errors

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Illegal Operation
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 Program Will Not Start or Load
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General Protection Fault (GPF), Invalid Page Fault, Access Violation

These are similar types of errors as illegal operation, at least for an A+ technician. The first three happen when application tries to use resources it is not supposed to use. When application task tries to write to part of RAM, which is not reserved for this application the system terminates the application.

An example error message would be:

BADAPP.EXE caused an invalid page fault in kernel32.dll

Again, most probably all those will happen because of bug in the software. Before you conclude it is a bug, be sure that software is properly installed and that the proper versions of .dll files it uses are there. Try reinstalling the application to make that sure, or some application’s installations have a Repair option. But that can also be a result of fault hardware such as RAM. If it is a RAM fault error would be much harder to reproduce, that can be an indication. You should try to reproduce an error because every pattern you find will help the developers to locate and solve the bug. A pattern can be something like for example: “If I use the tool1 just after the option1 and option2 are being set, the application terminates unexpectedly”. On the other hand, simply: “When I don’t use tool number three, the application never terminates unexpectedly”.

It is a very good practice to teach your customers about error messages. Explain to them that they cannot see too much in messages like ‘illegal operation’, ‘invalid page fault’, BSOD (well, they are not A+ technicians nor developers). Tell that they can just try to find some pattern when this can happen, such as: when using this particular device, application, applications feature… In addition, you should encourage customers very much to read all other error messages because they can tell them about the problem and even how to solve it. Encourage them that most of the error message they can understand.

Figure 320: Windows XP Error Report

 

Previous Topic/Section
Illegal Operation
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Pages in Current Topic/Section
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Next Page
 Program Will Not Start or Load
Next Topic/Section

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CertiGuide to A+ (A+ 4 Real) (http://www.CertiGuide.com/apfr/) on CertiGuide.com
Version 1.0 - Version Date: March 29, 2005

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