Is your Vista computer crashing? Use the Reliability Monitor to find out why!

Posted on March 18, 2007 at 1:21 am

I found an article from the How-To Geek about how to figure out why your computer is crashing. With Windows 2000 or Windows XP, there was no easy way to tell what exactly was causing the problem: software applications, hardware or Windows itself!

Now in Vista you can see your computer crashes and failures in a nice little graph that categorizes the failures and keeps count! It also keeps track of software installs/uninstalls and creates a summary report for a specified date range.

You can get to the Reliability Monitor by clicking on Performance and Reliability Monitor in Administrative Tools. Or you can simply type in perf in the Start Menu search box.

You can use this new feature to try and coincide a particular software install with the start of your computer crashes. If you look at the graph and see that a week ago you started to see problems and the number of system crashes rose, then you can check out that date and you might find you installed a software application that’s not on the Windows Vista compatibility list. Simply uninstall it and you’re back in business!