Windows Vista is a great operating system, but it can also be a little bit buggy. If you’re having crashes or problems with your computer, it’s important to use Windows Vista Reliability Monitor to troubleshoot them. This tool will help you identify and fix any issues that are causing your computer to crash. To start Windows Vista Reliability Monitor, open the Start menu and type “reliability monitor.” Once you’ve found the program, click on it. You’ll then be taken to a screen that looks like this: This screen will list all of the computers on your network that are using Windows Vista. You’ll see which ones are crashing and which ones aren’t. You can click on any of these computers to start Windows Vista Reliability Monitor for them. Once you’ve started Windows Vista Reliability Monitor for one of your computers, you’ll need to enter some information about it. On the left side of the screen, you’ll see a list of tools: These tools allow you to view information about your computer’s performance and crashes. The first tool is “Performance,” which will show you how well your computer is performing overall: The second tool is “Crash,” which will show you how many crashes and problems there have been on your computer this month: The third tool is “System,” which will show you how well your computer is running: : This bar shows how many minutes per day your computer has been running at its best performance (the blue line). The green line shows how many minutes per day your computer has been running at its worst performance (the red line). The black line shows the average time between these two lines (in minutes). If the black line falls below zero, then your computer has been running slowly and there may be some problems with it; if the black line rises above one
To get to this screen, you’ll just need to open Performance and Reliability Monitor in the administrative tools section (or just type perf into the start menu search box, and it’ll show up)
Once you are there, click on Reliability Monitor in the left hand tree menu, and you’ll be greeted with this screen:
You can track how stable your computer is, based on the number of crashes, and you can select a large number of dates to get a nice graph like you see above, which includes information on various system failures, as well as installs and uninstalls of software.
In order to illustrate how this could be used for troubleshooting, let’s give an example:
Your computer has been crashing for at least a few weeks now, but you aren’t sure what you did to make it start crashing. You go to the Reliability Monitor and discover that there were no crashes before 2 weeks ago, and the day before the crashes started, you installed some shareware software. Now we know that the shareware software is what probably caused the application crashes, and we can just uninstall that.
Note: The System Restore feature is very useful, and is well worth using as you tinker with Windows Vista. Most installations of software automatically set a restore point, but if you are tinkering with the registry or other system settings, you might want to set a restore point first.
