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

Less Fatal Errors 1 General Protection Fault (GPF), Invalid Page Fault, Access Violation

Speaking of which, what does illegal operation actually tell? It means an unknown instruction. OS or CPU got an unknown command, instruction. Because of that, the application terminates with such error message. There is nothing much an OS can do, but terminate the application. This represents a bug in the application or the part of OS. Windows XP brings new error reporting mechanism, when such (non-fatal, when a system survives) error happens you can report it to Microsoft by one click of a mouse to help them potentially improve there software, or at least let them know it is buggy. There is not much point reporting them errors in non-Microsoft applications. Be aware of a privacy issue, in order to be helpful an error report has to send some information about the environment, some little part of computers RAM memory. There is a possibility there are some private information there by accident, in normal circumstances you should not worry about that. If you still do worry, just examine the “what error report contains” before you click to send a report. In special circumstances, you can turn off reporting: Control Panel > System> Advanced > Error reporting.

Less Fatal Errors 1 General Protection Fault (GPF), Invalid Page Fault, Access Violation