I've been learning how to program for Windows for some time now and am getting pretty comfy with COM. I had thought to go over to Linux and do some C++ programming there and I wished to run Rosetta Commons so I installed Fedora. I had tried installing Ubuntu a few months ago and things got messy. I had a glitch, maybe caused by one of the live cd creators, my video card or something I don't know. Who Crashed suggested it was my video card and I had regular messages about ntfs.sys and page file issues.

At any rate I just installed Fedora and the same thing is happening again. I would like to think with the twenty five years of doing this that I might finally make some headway into debugging my system. I think I may have overlooked a lot of what could be done in favor of simply uninstalling, reinstalling and formatting and starting from scratch.

I have opened up the folder windows debugging tools, quite accidentally and just before I was going to clean sweep again, and I found KD and WinDbg. I had never seen these before and I felt that maybe I should look into this. I am quite familiar with the modern machine that is known as the computer, I know what a Kernel is and am now pretty familiar with at the very least Windows Operating System Services. I wish to begin tracking my own machines errors.

I understand that most kernel debugging is done on a second machine but I don't have one. And also I understand the goal of the debugger seems to be less about run of the mill errors and more about development time strategies but I'm sure there is more to this. This is my first go at this and I thought maybe I could get some suggestions on where to go from here. I would really like to learn ways to fix my machine and also maybe pick up some tricks on the dev side as well.

I hope this isn't too broad a question or too generalized. I'm really just looking for the keywords and an overview of the more routine strategies used.

thx