Have you ever bought a used PC with Windows already installed and wanted to know if the operating system is stable? Sometimes, even with a quick glance, you won’t be able to tell if Windows is damaged or if there are other problems.
A quick way to see the health of a Windows machine is to open the Reliability Monitor. It’s a built-in tool that has been around since Windows Vista and still works on Windows 10. You probably haven’t heard much about it, but in my opinion it is quite useful.
In this article, I will show you how to open the Reliability Monitor and what information it can provide you. Windows often logs many errors, but they don’t necessarily show up in your daily activities. However, if left untouched, even more problems will eventually arise.
Reliability Monitor
To open the tool, just click Start and type trust. The first result should be View Reliability History.
By default, Reliability Monitor opens with a graph that is configured for daily viewing. You can quickly view all the errors that have occurred every day over the past few weeks.
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There are several categories in the graph as well, so you can see exactly where errors are occurring. These categories include application crashes, Windows crashes, other crashes and warnings. Information items are almost always displayed in blue, but this is normal.
If you want to see what the red cross or warning symbol is for, just click on that column. In the lower section, you will see a list of all events for that day. Note that these are not the same events as in the Event Viewer, but a short list of important things.
As you can see above, I clicked 11/7 to see what the critical event is about. In my case, there was a problem with Slack not opening properly, so the symbol is in the Application Error line. Click View technical details for detailed information that may help you solve your problem.
Sometimes this information is helpful and sometimes not entirely useful. It really depends on your problem. If you only see a few critical events during the month, and most of them seem to be one-time problems that don’t show up all the time, then the system is probably pretty stable. Please note that it will be difficult for you to find a computer that does not have at least a few critical events.
For example, you will see critical events if Windows did not shut down as expected. This is not as important as errors related to crashes or not running Windows processes. However, if you see a lot of critical and warning symbols, then the system is not very stable. At the very bottom of the screen, you will see a See All Problem Reports link, which gives a nice list of all warnings and errors.
Obviously, this isn’t the best way to tell if a computer is working properly or not, but it’s a good way to check. You should always do additional testing of the machine by running programs, changing computer settings, etc. Another good way to quickly check the stability of your Windows system is to view the summary in Event Viewer.
When you open it, the summary is displayed at the top right. You can expand the sections and then double-click the items to see these specific errors and warnings. Again, 92 errors in 7 days might seem like a lot, but typical Windows systems, even stable ones, will have a decent amount. Enjoy!
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