Use Windows Vista Reliability Monitor to Troubleshoot Crashes
If you've owned a computer running Windows, you've probably complained about things crashing on your computer. Windows Vista includes a Reliability Monitor utility that lets you track all of the times that something crashed.
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.
I couldn't believe the requirement to be in "Safe Mode" to successfully System Restore VISTA.
I worked for day trying to figure what was wrong. Who knew?
New to win Vista and a Toshiba laptop which has crashed or lost something when in use causing lines and a dark screen to appear for no reason.
I opened the the Realibility Monitor as listed, and it does show errors, but does not say what caused them.
It only says no events for the selected types are available so I don't know how I can prevent them in the future.
Thanks for any suggestions.
I never had this with my desktop running xp
I opened the reliability monitor and it does a good job on showing problems/crashes but there is limited help in finging the causes. Problems shown: IE stopped working, Outlook stopped responding, or OS stopped working.
Any suggestions?
I read this article…i reformatted my drive 2 times…Comprehensive (7passes) and then a custom lucky 13!!!…well… to no avail, computer still crashes!!! I get the BSOD (blue screen of death) everytime. any suggestions?…thanks alot…James S.
Hi, your article is very informative.
What kind of numbers in the reliability monitor would warrant really changing things around? I have reached as low as 2.9 but I am currently at 6.9 I believe. I'm not sure if I should expect more than this. Perhaps with SP1 it will improve.
Thank you for any suggestions.
What made you think that doing a comprehensive pass or a custom 13 pass would actually improve the stability of your system Jame S.
I got onto the Reliability Monitor easily but it means nothing to me. How is an ordinary 60year old grandmother supposed to know what all this means?