Is your Windows computer having problems? Random restart? Back to find it frozen? If so, one of the first places you want to check out is the Windows Reliability Monitor. This is a built-in utility that can provide valuable data about critical events and problems your computer may encounter. Here’s how it works.
The screenshots and steps in this article cover Windows 10. However, Windows Reliability Monitor is also available in earlier versions of Windows.
Launch Windows Reliability Monitor
The fastest way to launch the Reliability Monitor is through the Start Menu. From your Windows 10 desktop, click on the Start button and search for the word reliability. Select the result labeled View Reliability History.
Alternatively, you can access the Reliability Monitor via Control Panel by going to Control Panel> Security and Maintenance> Reliability Monitor.
How to Use Windows Reliability Monitor
When Windows Reliability Monitor launches, you should see a graph at the top organized by date. The oldest entry starts on the left and the newest one on the right. A blue line is plotted on the chart, ranking your system’s overall reliability on a scale of 1 to 10, with ten being best or most reliable.
In the column for each date is a series of cells that represent the five categories affecting reliability. These are application errors, Windows failures, miscellaneous failures, warnings, and general information. If your computer has a problem or event in any of these categories – such as unexpected shutdowns, application crashes, or system freezes – you’ll see a mark in a similar variety.
Troubleshooting with Windows Reliability Monitor
Clicking on a specific date will display each category’s details in the list at the bottom of the window. Based on our example screenshots, our Windows 10 PC ran flawlessly in the first part of February. However, a series of malfunctions seems to have been encountered in the last few weeks. Looking at the information for each problem day, we can see that these errors correspond to our overclocking tests, a job that often leads to errors and unwanted reboots.
As a result, we can safely ignore these warnings since we know what is causing them, and we’ve fixed the issue. However, if we see the application or system issue that we were not expecting, we can click View technical details to learn more about the cause of the problem and investigate further.
And that’s really where Windows Reliability Monitor comes in handy. Generally will not solve your problem for you (the option “check for a solution” appears next to some events seldom returns anything useful). But it is beneficial for narrows the contempt of your computer so you can check and fix problems inside your computer more centrally. And sometimes, such as in the case of an accident that happens while you’re away, it can help you identify problems you didn’t even know you had.
Suppose you find information in a particular reliability report particularly helpful. In that case, you can also save the Windows reliability history as an XML file by clicking on the button save reliability history button at the bottom left of the Reliability Monitor window.
