PC & MOBILE LIFESTYLE HARDWARE

What Is the Windows 7

Reliability Monitor And How to
Get The Most Out Of It
By Ryan Dube / August 31, 2012 31-08-2012 / 5 minutes

Ryan Dube
1039 articles

Ryan has a BSc degree in Electrical

Engineering. He's worked 13 years
Email Facebook Pinterest Twitter
in automation engineering, 5 years
Advertisement in IT, and now is an Apps Engineer.
A former Managing Editor of
MakeUseOf, he's spoken at national
Ace Your Next Paper conferences on Data Visualization
and has been featured on national
Fix misplaced commas, misused words, grammar goofs, and more.
Try now! TV and radio.

Grammarly DOWNLOAD

How do you know when a computer is reliable? How exactly do you even
de籢ne something as abstract as “reliability”.
Save Time,
When I think about what makes my computer reliable, in my opinion it is all
about whether or not the computer can run the applications that I need it
Edit Fast
to, without any sort of lagging, freezing up or crashing. When an Grammarly
application suddenly crashes on me without any explanation, or with
nothing more than some odd Windows error code, I start to get Trusted by millions
concerned. Is my computer infected with a virus or malware? Why can’t it of students, faculty,
run a program that normally runs under any other Windows PC? and professionals
This is essentially how Microsoft decided to de籢ne “reliability” as well. In worldwide. Try now!
fact, embedded into Windows 7 is a useful reliability monitor that lets you
not only visualize the current reliability level of your computer, but you can
also see a historic log of  how reliable your computer has performed over
time. DOWNLOAD

How can you see the reliability of your computer? Well, Chris recently
covered using a tool to research windows software error reports. This is a
great tool to research current software errors you may be experiencing,
but the beauty of this tool is that it also serves as a historic log and
research tool for your Windows 7 reliability level over time.

Latest Giveaways!
  Turn Dumb Remote-
Controlled Devices into
Smart Voice Controlled
Ones, with Bond
   Is the Nooie Cam 360 the
Should You PayLIFESTYLE
PC & MOBILE More Attention to Windows
HARDWARE Aᛠordable IP Cam You’re
So០ware Error Reports? [Geeks Weigh In] Looking For?
Windows tracks every application crash and freeze on your
system. It records detailed information about the crashes and   No More Dead Plants,
even tries to provide a solution to each error report, helping you with The Govee Wi-Fi
籢x problems. With that in... Temperature and
READ MORE Humidity Monitor

Related Articles
Monitoring Your Windows Reliability   WINDOWS

How to Fix a Black Screen

Why should you care about your past reliability? Isn’t it only today that of Death Error in
really matters? Well, not really. Windows 10

Sometimes patterns can reveal a whole lot about how your computer may   WINDOWS

be infected without you even realizing it.  An infection may not cause your Bluetooth Not Working in
Windows 10? 10 Ways to
computer to come to a screetching halt, but it may cause a background
Fix Pairing Problems
service to crash every few days. But, by monitoring your reliability history,
you’ll be able to spot those patterns and shut down malicious software   WINDOWS , PRODUCTIVITY

before it can do any damage. Syncing Problems With

OneDrive on Windows
10? Here Are 10 Easy
1 Exchange EDB Recovery - Kernel® for Fixes
Exchange Server
Recover Corrupt Exchange EDB Files in Just a Few Clicks. Start Free Trial Now!
nucleustechnologies.com
Latest Videos
2 Create a Website With Wix
Go to Wix.com to Discover How to Develop an Online Presence for Your
Business or Brand. WIX.com

To use the reliability monitor on your Windows 7 machine, go into the

Control Center and make sure “View by” is set to “Category”. Click on
“System and Security” and then under “Action Center”, click on “Review
your computer’s status and resolve issues”.
How to Program Arduino in
windows reliability monitor VSCode (Using Platform.io)

Click on “Maintenance” to expand that section, and then click on the link to
“View reliability history”.

windows reliability

Now you’re in the reliability monitor tool. This is a very large chart that will
range over approximately a month at a time. It shows you how your
Is the Nooie Cam 360 the
reliability level has fared on a daily basis from week to week. You’ll notice Aᛠordable IP Cam You're Looking
that as each day passes without a Windows or Application crash, or For?
without any system failures, your overall reliability rating continues to
climb. The goal is obviously to have a perfect 10.

windows reliability

The tool logs application failures, windows failures, miscellaneous failures,

system warnings and even informational noti籢cations. When you click on
each day, you’ll see the actual details of those alerts and noti籢cations in How to Stop Irrelevant YouTube
PC & MOBILE LIFESTYLE HARDWARE
the lower display pane. Recommendations

The category of alerts are displayed in the monitor with a unique icon. This
gives you a quick glance at what level of event occurred on that day and
how serious any problems were. You may notice that on some days the
noti籢cations had no effect on the reliability index – the error was not
serious enough for the index to get lowered. However, on other days you’ll
notice that one application crash drops your overall reliability by nearly 30
to 50 percent.
Guess the Chimes | TGTS S3E13
windows reliability

It all comes down to what caused the crash and why. In the detail pane,
you can investigate some of those serious failures that caused a huge
drop in reliability. The “Summary” 籢eld gives you a brief explanation of
what happened, but to see more details you can click on “View technical
details”.
Guess the Theme Songs... Again! |
windows reliability and performance monitor TGTS S3E14

For example, I noticed that at least every 3 or 4 days, MotoConnect.exe

was crashing. This isn’t even an application that I use anymore – it was a
version of the driver for the Motorola Droid that I installed back in 2010.
The Description will tell you a lot of information about the application that
crashed, right down to the dll 籢le that faulted.

1 Create Your Own Website Turn Dumb Remote-Controlled

Find Out How to Build a Professional Devices, into Smart Ones, with
Web Presence. Wix Has All The Tools Bond
You Need.
WIX.com

2 Modern marketing reporting

All your marketing metrics in one
place! SEM, SEO, Social, web
analytics and much more.
Trending Now
Supermetrics
Build a Raspberry Pi Retro
What Is the Windows 7 Reliability Monitor And How to Get The Most Out Gaming Console With This FREE
Ebook!
Of It reliability4 by Rob Nightingale

How to Fix a Black Screen of

Certainly, there’s a newer version of the Motorola driver software. Sure Death Error in Windows 10
by Christian Cawley
enough, on the Motorola site I discovered a much newer driver called
5 No-Signup Free Online Video
Motorola Mobility that can replace this older version that’s driving my
Editors That Keep You
system reliability down with its constant crashing. Anonymous
by Mihir Patkar

windows reliability and performance monitor How to Delete Facebook

Notifications
by Dan Price
The lesson to learn from this is that it’s not always a virus or malware that
Google Maps Now Oᛠers
can make your system unreliable. Sometimes it might just be an outdated Augmented Reality Directions
service that keeps crashing in the background and you may not even by Dave Parrack

realize it, because it doesn’t kick off any active alert windows. However, How to Spot If Gmail Has Been
Hacked and What to Do Next
the reliability monitor can help you spot those background issues you may
by Simon Batt
not normally be aware of. Sometimes, 籢xing those background crashes The 15 Best Microso០ Word
PC & MOBILE LIFESTYLE HARDWARE Cover Page Templates
can improve the overall performance of your computer.
by Sandy Writtenhouse

What Is Windows Server and

Another thing that can affect performance and reliability is whether your
How Is It Diᛠerent From
computer is properly up to date and patched. In the process of analyzing Windows?
my reliability log, I noticed a constant warning message popping up about by Ben Stegner

every week. Clicking on the alerts, I learned that there was a list of about
10 critical Microsoft patches that were failing to install automatically.

What Is the Windows 7 Reliability Monitor And How to Get The Most
Latest Deals
Out Of It reliability7
Affiliate Disclosure: By buying the products we
recommend, you help keep the lights on at
MakeUseOf. Read more.
I thought that was odd, so I checked my Windows Update icon in the task
bar and upon opening it up, sure enough there were a number of updates
waiting to install. To 籢x this constant, ongoing problem just required a
quick manual install of the critical updates, and voila – I ensured that my
long-term reliability level for my computer would increase over the next
few weeks.

windows reliability and performance monitor

By the way, the daily log is also a great place to go to see not only “bad”
events that take place on your computer, but also any other activity that
might occur, like software installations.

What Is the Windows 7 Reliability Monitor And How to Get The Most Out
Of It reliability9

If you work in IT, this can be a real life-saver when you’re trying to 籢gure
out what a user did on a computer that made it start crashing constantly.
Did they recently install or uninstall an application? You can see it all here
by date and time. This is an awesome IT troubleshooting tool.

If you want to get to the most serious issues causing problems for your
computer, go after those huge drops that kill your reliability in one fell
swoop.

windows reliability monitor

Typically, you’ll see a critical event that occurs on a recurring basis. Fix that
one issue and you’ll go a long way in improving your overall computer
reliability.

As you can see, the Windows reliability monitor has a lot of uses for
troubleshooting and monitoring a lot about your computer. If you make it a
regular habit to launch the monitor and review any recent issues, you’re
sure to keep your computer running at it’s top possible performance.

Did you already know about the reliability monitor before reading this
article? Is this the 籢rst time you’ve seen it? Does it seem like something
you will use to maintain your computer? Share your thoughts and insights
in the comments section below.

Image Credit: stock diagram via Shutterstock

Explore more about: Computer Maintenance, Windows 7.