Windows 7 Reliability Monitor – Resolve PC Problems

In Windows Vista, you had the Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor, but in Windows 7, these two features are not separate tools. The Windows Reliability Monitor is an advanced utility that constantly monitors your computer for errors and keeps a history of any problems.

It also calculates what is called the Stability Index, which is a number from 1 to 10, 1 being the least stable and 10 being the most stable system. You can use Reliability Monitor to review past problems with your computer and to find possible solutions.

To open the Reliability Monitor in Windows 7, click on the Action Center icon in the system tray (the white flag) and click on Open Action Center.

Then click on the down arrow next to Maintenance and click on View reliability history.

The first thing you’ll see is a graph that lists out the days with each day including small icons for failures, such as application failures, Windows failures, warnings, Miscellaneous failures, and informational messages.

The top part of the chart is the actual stability index with a blue line that indicates the current value. As you can see, my computer was a 10, but dropped after I had some application failures and warnings.

If you click on a particular day, you can see each individual problem along with details.

You can click on View technical details to see the exact error message for each warning or error.

At the very bottom, you can click on Check for solutions to all problems to get a list of possible fixes for the problems you’ve experienced. You can also click on View all problem reports to to get a list of problems sorted by program instead of by date.

Finally, you can also click on Save reliability history to save the full report to an XML file. You can then send this file to someone else in order to get technical help.