Windows Tools, Help & Guides

The System Health Report is a great feature of Windows 7 that will help you find potential problems with your PC and point you in the right direction to a resolution. This report records details about your computer’s performance, resource usage, and more and includes diagnostic information about things that aren’t working with resolution suggestions.

Specifically, the report includes:

• Diagnostic Results (Warnings, Performance)
• Software Configuration (OS Checks, Security Center Information, System Services, Startup Programs)
• Hardware Configuration (Disk Checks, Systems, Desktop Rating, BIOS, Devices)
• CPU (Process, Service, Services, System)
• Network (TCP, Interface, IP, UDP)
• Disk (Hot files, Disk breakdown, Physical disk, NTFS Performance)
• Memory (Processes, Counters)

In this guide, we’ll cover the following:

1. How to run a system health check.
2. View the output of a system health check.
3. Research Issues.
4. Fix Issues.
5. Get help with reported issues.

Run a System Health Check

To run a system health check:

1. Press Winkey+R (Start > Run…)
2. Type perfmon /report and press Enter.

The report will now gather necessary information:

After one minute, the report will be available:

View the Output of a System Health Check

The output from a system health check can look a little overwhelming but it can be broken down into smaller chunks to see potential problems.

For the basics system checks part of the report, we see there are failures on:

• Security Center Tests
• System Service Tests
• Hardware Device and Driver Tests

The resources look good. If they don’t you can keep an eye on them by reading last weeks guide on resource monitor:

Now we’ve identified the issues, lets take a deeper look through the report.

Research Issues

As mentioned above, there are problems with the following areas:

• Security Center Tests
• System Service Tests
• Hardware Device and Driver Tests

Let’s see what’s up with the security center tests and hardware and device driver tests.

Failure with Security Center Tests

I had the following failure with the security center test:

The information tells me that Security Center has not recorded an anti-virus product:

I did some research online (as I have Microsoft Security Essentials installed) and found that I’m not the only one with this issue (a thorough read of the thread is quite entertaining as someone repeatedly tries to help but doesn’t understand the issue at hand.)

So, for the Security Center Issues, we’re in the clear (although, in the writing of this guide, we managed to stumble upon a glitch in MSE/System Health Checker.)

Fix Issues

Another issue was with Hardware Device and Driver Tests. This time we may have a real problem on our hand:

We see that a network device is disabled (which is on purpose, but let’s see how to fix this issue any way.)

To fix the issue with a disabled network adapter:

1. Click the Network icon in the notification area, and click Open Network and Sharing Center.

   

2. Click Change adapter settings.

   

3. Right click the disabled adapter and click Enable.

Get Help with Reported Problems

There are two good ways to get help with reported problems that you aren’t able to find an answer to with research:

1. Email the report to a friend.
2. Get help on Windows Forums.

If you choose to get help with reported issues, you should save the report to send to a friend via email or attach to a post in Windows Forums.

Save a Report

To save your report:

1. Click File > Save As…

   
   

2. Give the report a name.

   

3. Open the report with Internet Explorer (or your favorite browser) to make sure it works before sending:

Get Help with Issues on Windows Forums

Looking to get help from our friendly members of Windows Forums, check this guide for tips on how to get help: How to Get Great Help with Windows from Windows Forums.

About Rich

Rich is the owner and creator of Windows Guides; he spends his time breaking things on his PC so he can write how-to guides to fix the problems he creates.

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