Using the Reliability Monitor

Topic

New Reply

Is your machine feeling a little flakey? Check out the Reliability Monitor. Easy, fast and uncannily accurate. It won’t give you solutions, but it wil
[See the full post at: Using the Reliability Monitor]

Reply | Quote

Replies

I just had a look in Windows 7. It’s cute, but says almost nothing. How is this not reliability theater ?

Reply | Quote

It’s a quick way to bring up Windows Events that may be causing problems. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it’s just a graph.

Reply | Quote

“Reliability Theater”… Love it. 🙂 I like that characterization because you should always strive to be proud of what it shows.

But in all seriousness, the data in the bottom section, “Reliability details…”, can help you track whether important things are going wrong on your system over a period of time.

If your system is not experiencing serious events, as shown in the Reliability Monitor, then it is reliable. If it shows a perfect 10 or near to it, then congratulations!

With regard to making a Windows system reliable, maintaining a Windows system well over the long term is not terribly difficult, but it does take a willingness to learn good practices and some tweaks.

Many people often think things like “Windows has a flakey design” or “I expect to have to reinstall it from time to time”. THESE THINGS ARE SIMPLY NOT TRUE. I can say this with confidence because I’ve ALWAYS maintained reliable Windows systems, which I only ever have had to install once.

Just for example, showing that it can be done, my current “Reliability Theater” readings for Windows 7, 8, and 10 systems:

http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win7/Reliability20170120.png

http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win81/Reliability20170120.png

http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10/Reliabililty20170120.png

-Noel

Reply | Quote

Just because it is a graph helps.

Reply | Quote

+1 🙂

Reply | Quote

Another great article, Woody! The Reliability Monitor is one of the first utilities I check when investigating computer problems. As you wrote, RelMon can quickly pinpoint problems, especially if the user can only vaguely identify or describe them.

You also mentioned a future “InfoWorld” article will focus on Event Viewer. I find Event Viewer to be the best Microsoft Windows utility for diagnosing problems. Over the years, I’ve developed a number of techniques and methods for using Event Viewer to drill down to the relevant events. I will be most interested to read your article on this powerful utility!

Reply | Quote

I should add, I’ve been using Event Viewer since Windows 2000! Hard to believe it’s been around that long.

Reply | Quote

@Noel, Great post, fully agree. Ditto to Woody for launching this thread.

I do not have the broad experience you bring to the table, but I too have found the Reliability Monitor to be a very valued tool.

This was where I first found my first and best leads to troubleshoot the conflicts with the Fall 2016 WU updates and the Intel BT drivers, and also has been a good indicator of when MSE is acting up. As I do not use the BT regularly, I did not notice it failing. When I did it was the RM that told me when it failed and that was the day of that batch of WU updates.

It has also been a good tool to use to configure services to work more seamlessly. For instance, I have changed some services to have a delayed start or a manual start as I have found some will fail to load if they are all trying to launch at once upon boot. Others (usually third party, not Windows OS) are just not necessary on a daily basis and may conflict or fail to start or properly shutdown depending on what is running or not running.

Examples like this are the many built-in updaters or services that allow a device to operate instantly upon plugging in. I need those devices only when I need them. A rare few in the past have failed to load if other programs or services are not loaded or are loaded. Using the monitor has allowed me to alter the loading sequence. I do not need my digital camera download utility service to be running unless I am actually downloading direct from the camera which is very rare. I keep up with updates from a number of sites and I do not need a built-in updater telling me a new update is available, so why have it set to automatic.

On my desktop, a self-built, no bloatware install, my line is generally flat at the top of the scale, but every so often takes a deep dip, usually due to IE freezes or glitches, Outlook glitches, MS Games for Windows crashes on closing, or MSE updates failing. The monitor is a fast glance to give a timeline and point of reference before I look at system logs and do research online. That was actually how I found AskWoody.com. That PC has been running the same Win7-64Pro SP1 for 5 years.

My Laptop, however, with lots of proprietary manufacturer software tends to be a lower level line, but only a few errors, but when they happen they are big ones like the Intel BT failures. RM told me when it happened and when it was actually fixed.

Reply | Quote

Hey, if you have any tips – or links – let me know. I’ll be working on that early next week.

Reply | Quote

Reliability Monitor, and the System Health Report, are two valuable tools in helping to pinpoint issues on a system.

Shortcut to System Health Report…

Click Start

In the Run box, enter perfmon /report

Reply | Quote

I also use the Performance Monitor, along with Speccy.

Handy for checking things out.

perfmon /report

Reply | Quote

Thanks!

I need to check out Speccy.

I run Resmon all the time, and I’d like to get something reliable that’ll fit in (or over) the taskbar.

Reply | Quote

well, I have a thumb drive for keeping tools and drivers and assorted aids
from Sysinternals (Mark Russinovich) where is he?
Autoruns
Process Explorer
Process Monitor

for cleaning, the built in Windows disk cleaner and DISM
Defrag on CMD> Defrag [drive letter]: /h /u /v

third party tools:
CCleaner
Defraggler
Privazer- Advanced Mode not for the faint of heart.
Revo Uninstaller- then a trip through the registry to make sure all the messy unwanted program installation mistakes are cleaned up. It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff gets left behind all over the place.

also Black Viper (Charles M. Sparks) is an excellent resource for service configuration(s) (I turn off most everything). I run win7 just fine with 27 live processes including Task Mgr at an average of 600-700MB ram.
I use Easeus Partition Manager
and EasyBCD for dual boot as well

Everything I use is portable except EasyBCD and Easeus so I don’t clutter up the os.
not to forget to thank Woody and company, your site has saved my bacon ever since Redmond went south.

Reply | Quote

What would be ridiculously helpful is how to decipher event errors that only provide info such as “a failure occurred at 0x?????.” Many, if not most times a Google search of those cryptic numbers bring up nothing useful or such a wide range of possibilities it’s close to impossible to pinpoint the actual problem.

Once upon a time back in the early XP days I stumbled across a guy that would decipher these cryptic errors if you sent them to him in an email but that source dried up long ago.

Reply | Quote

Interesting! I resort to Google, but there must be a better way.

http://www.eventid.net/ is supposed to help you look up event id’s.

Reply | Quote

Not sure, how long reliability monitor/report will last in Windows 10. My personal impression is, that Microsoft will hide this tool in future.

During writing about Windows 10, I found out, that it has become more and more complicated to enter reliabilty report.

For my own, I frequently check the event monitor – but it’s nothing for ordinary users.

Anyway, thx for pointing people back to reliability monitor

Reply | Quote

You bet. If you have any other suggestions, I’m all ears!

Reply | Quote

Yes, Noel, I can see you have a flat, boring and totally uninteresting graph.

While mine is entertaining and lovely : it jumps all over the place, has nice little coloured icons, and plenty of things I can click into in order for other things to pop up. It beats watching paint dry anytime.

The problem is, how do you get from here to there ? Of course, I duly clicked into the many “Check for a solution” links, which never failed to bring up the very Microsoftesque “No solution – When solutions are available, they will appear in the Action Center – And please don’t disturb us anymore” (not sure about the latter).

I could not even find, in my timeline, the repeated crash of Windows Explorer I experienced recently, of which I could only extract myself by shutting down physically the blasted thing. It came — and it went. Why that ? I don’t know.

I’ll tell you something : this PC is unbearably slow, abnormally so. I have to wait for right-click. It began misbeahaving almost after reinstall from scratch, a year ago, in fact before I had even finished reinstalling. Before applying any Microsoft “updates”, it was fast as hell.

Of course, if I reinstalled, it was to cure slowness to begin with.

I’m glad to learn it’s absolutely not necessary to reinstall Windows in order for it to behave correctly, but I can assure you there’s no lack of willingness to “learn good practices and some tweaks” on my part.

I spend hours and hours reading about such practices. I wrote hundreds of pages of memos to myself from resources gathered on the Internet. I bought books. Not “for dummies” books, supposedly advanced books. On actual paper.

I still haven’t found the repository of “good practices and some tweaks” which would make this computer work normally fast. People always tell you : don’t install crap on your computer, but they never define “crap”. If I have a computer, it’s precisely to install crap on it. Meaning, things. Lots of things. Experiment. Try to push the envelope, find a better mousetrap. That’s the point.

I recently ran one “System Maintenance Troubleshooter” from Microsoft. All it does is find unused shortcuts on the Desktop. Oh, and it erased some old troubleshooting logs. I’m sure my PC is slow as molasses because of some broken Desktop shortcuts and old logs.

Can someone point me to a starting point, somewhere ? A checklist, something ? Not the usual “buy a SSD” or “Empty your recycle bin”. Thanks !

Reply | Quote

Mark is currently the Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Azure.

The Sysinternals tools are still maintained.

Nir Sofer also has excellent tools at nirsoft.net

Reply | Quote

I was wondering if he was asking about what Mark’s doing these days.

Man, the guy’s a rock star. A prolific one at that.

http://www.trojanhorsethebook.com/books/

Reply | Quote

Where can he find the time to write those novels? ?

Reply | Quote

Really. And they’re GOOD novels….

Reply | Quote

Mark also does excellent tutorial videos…

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3316

Reply | Quote

When you did the clean install of Windows, did you also do the chipset drivers for the motherboard? While many times MS has the generic driver and .inf files and installs them, the MB or PC manufacturer has more specifically tailored and optimized versions for their equipment.

It is also possible that your PC has a SATA 3 (6GB) controller that needs drivers to work in SATA 3 mode, and is now defaulting to SATA 2 (3GB).

Both the above should be available on the manufacturer website under support.

Just one quick test – do the left click on the My Computer icon on the desktop, select properties, show the correct amount of RAM. It is possible a ram chip failed and the machine is now running in one channel mode with half the RAM. That would be a real anchor on speed.

Reply | Quote

Thanks for that link! I have not tried it yet, but it looked interesting.

Reply | Quote

Thank you, Bill C.

> My Computer correctly shows the 4 GB installed.

> I did install the “chipset drivers”, from the MB manufacturer (Asus) and/or AMD’s site. To be honest, the whole process of identifying the correct drivers and installing them was a nightmare, and just reading my notes on the subject gives me a headache. There were several alternatives with no obvious preferred options, and I repeatedly installed/uninstalled in order to try and reach the correct combination.

> I also (with great apprehension) upgraded the BIOS, and somehow managed not to brick the whole lot.

> I have a SATA 6GB controller. No idea whether it works to speed. Device Manager says “device is working properly”.

> I also have an auxiliary 3GB SATA controller that I use for external disks, and those take a while to show up under Windows Explorer — which they didn’t in my previous install.

Reply | Quote

Nice… I can see he has a piece about investigating sluggish performance with Process Explorer. To me, that would probably be like attending a conference by a Nobel prize of medicine, and then attempting cancer surgery on myself, but I’ll have a look nonetheless.

Reply | Quote

Earlier Tech Ed video Mark did…

https://channel9.msdn.com/events/teched/northamerica/2010/wcl315

Backup before making any changes to your system.

Reply | Quote

Thanks, jmwoods.. will check that as well.

Reply | Quote

Depending on the age of the MB, the SATA 6GB controller may be natively hardware supported or may need drivers. My MB is now over 6 years old and required Marvell (controller chip maker) drivers.

If that is an eSATA port, it may also need drivers depending on system board age.

I can fully understand your apprehension. Good luck and hope you get the speed back.

Reply | Quote

A nice feature that Speccy has is the ability to save the results to a text file.

That makes it possible to use a file compare program like Beyond Compare to see differences in a system over time.

Reply | Quote

Great idea! I didn’t know that…

Reply | Quote

You can also do the same thing with Autoruns.

Reply | Quote