How to Find Out What is Causing Problems on Your Windows 7 PC

Are you experiencing problems on your PC such as hangs or crashes? Here is one possible way to see what is causing the trouble. Take a look at the Reliability Monitor that comes with Windows 7. For example, if you have had a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crash, you may not have gotten a chance to record the error messages. But you can retrieve the data from a BSOD in the Reliability Monitor history. It also can help you find out if a particular application has issues. It displays a timeline for various system events and divides them into failures, warnings and information.

To open Reliability Monitor

1. Type “reliability” or just “rel” in the Start search bar
2. Click “View reliability history”
3. A report will open

 An alternate way to open Reliability Monitor is the following:

1. Open the Action Center
2. Click “Maintenance” to expand the menu
3. Under “Check for solutions to problems reports”, click “View reliability history”
4. A report covering a selected period of time like the one in the figure below will open

 Click a date for more information about a reported event. In the figure below, the date 1/1/2013 (shown by the colored bar) has been selected. Two events on that date were logged and are listed in the bottom panel.

 Reliability Monitor also comes with windows Vista.