Windows Tools, Help & Guides

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There’s no denying it, Windows 7 is a very stable and reliable operating system.

Personally I’ve never experienced a BSOD with Windows 7 (even during Beta testing!) and nearly all crashes or reliability problems occur by 3rd party software.

Nestled away in the Action Centre is the Reliability History (RH) available to view.

The RH will show you Critical Events such as Explorer stopped working; Warnings such as unsuccessful application updates and Informational Events such as successful driver installations.

Not only does the RH show errors and events, it’ll show solutions (if available) to these issues and provide technical details about them so you can help prevent them occurring in the future, thus, improving reliability in Windows 7.

To open the RH, click the white Action Centre flag in the notification area, and click Open Action Centre

Next to Maintenance, click on the chevron and select View reliability history

The reliability monitor will take a few seconds to generate the report.

Once it has, you’ll instantly see how reliable your Windows 7 PC has been.

As you can see, if I click a day around two weeks ago, you can see I had issues with Office 2010, specifically, OneNote.  I can check for solutions to the problem by clicking the link in the fourth column.

I’ll be honest here and say that solutions are seldom available.

So, if I choose a day where errors occurred I can view technical information about it,  make a note of the problem and research it online.

It’s all about making your PC more stable and reliable see.

While some may argue that in this day and age, an OS should be ‘indestructible’, it’s inevitable that problems will happen at some point.  The RH makes it easier to see what is happening and why it’s happening.  Of course, the Event Viewer is more extensive than the RH and gives heaps more information, the Event Viewer however can be a confusing and off-putting place to be, making the RH a great way to check up on your system.

So, how reliable is your Windows 7 PC?  Let us know in the forums.

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