How to use Windows’ Reliability Monitor

Got a persistent problem with your PC and can’t figure out what it is? There’s one tool built into Windows that can help – the Reliability Monitor.

Perhaps there’s a favourite program or game that keeps crashing, or everything just locks up for no apparent reason on a regular basis. While the Reliability Monitor is not a foolproof fix for every PC ill, if you can’t figure out what’s going wrong, it can help point you in the right direction.

Windows Reliability Monitor

Windows Reliability Monitor - turns crash dialogue into plain English

To use Reliability Monitor, simply type ‘Reliability’ into the Start menu and press enter. This will call up a simple graph which displays your PC’s reliability history over the last few weeks. You can choose to display the graph in days or weeks — whichever scale you select, each vertical bar represents one time unit.

A score of perfect 10 on the line graph means there have been no reliability problems as far as Windows is concerned, and anything in between should be fixed. A day when your PC or an application crashed is marked by a lowercase ‘i’ icon, click on it and it will report events in the space underneath.

These can include things like installing a new program or updating drivers, so it’s more useful to click on ‘Review problem reports’. This will show you a list of errors, which you can then investigate further using internet searches or the built in troubleshooter.

Even if Windows can’t find a specific fix to the problem, you should be able to take the information in the error window and enter it into Google to see if anyone else has had similar issues.

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