Back in “the old days”, you could use a ball-point pen to break into the debugger. No, I haven’t stayed too long at the fair – you could use the tip of the ball-point pen to short the nearest pair of pins to create a hardware crash dump. Obviously this isn’t recommended (or supported!), but as the old adage goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Since then, the introduction of hardware dump switches (which are usually referred to as NMI switches) eliminated the need to dig out your trusty pen and start poking around on your systems. On the Performance team, we request server dumps routinely to troubleshoot a variety of issues. Normally we use the CrashOnCtrlScroll key combination to capture a manual memory dump. However, there have been instances where the server does not respond to this key combination. In these cases, the NMI switch can be your best friend …
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