YOU’LL NEED THIS

WHOCRASHED HOME EDITION

(www.resplendence.com/whocrashed)

TWEAKING.COM WINDOWS REPAIR TOOL

(www.tweaking.com)

GOT A PROBLEM WITH YOUR PC? The answers to your woes lie somewhere buried deep inside Windows itself, you just need to know where to find them. Windows 11 may not introduce any new troubleshooting tools to the mix, but it continues to support tried and tested tools, including Device Manager, Event Viewer, and a host of troubleshooters.

We’ll take an in-depth look at these as well as some other useful tools. Reliability Monitor is built into Windows, while the third-party tools we showcase—WhoCrashed and Tweaking. com’s Windows Repair tool—are included because they provide convenient access to system logs and tools such as System File Checker and Windows’ powerful disk-checking tools.

If the tools featured can’t provide a solution to your problem, they will at least arm you with lots of useful information with which you can go hunting for solutions elsewhere using the power of the web. The answers to your problems lie hidden somewhere, either within your PC or out on the wider internet, and in the unlikely event you’re left stumped, you can always contact us directly for help—email doctor@maximumpc.com with your problem and remember to include as much information as you can to help us to help you.

–NICK PEERS

A

1 GET A SYSTEM HEALTH OVERVIEW

If you’re plagued by a poorly performing system, but don’t know exactly where to look, type ‘reliability’ into the Search box and click ‘View reliability history’ to open the Reliability Monitor—yes, it’s still there in Windows 11. This provides an overview of your system’s stability over the past 12 months— you’ll get an overall rating of 1 to 10, updated daily. Whenever failures or warnings are recorded in the Events log, your rating drops accordingly. The longer it goes without problems, the higher the ratings go.

>> Of more use are the summaries beneath the rating line graph—here, you’ll find a list of notable events for the selected day. Look for those where failures or warnings have been recorded, then select the most recent day on which they occurred [Image A]. You’ll get a summary of the problems recorded, including the application name and a short explanation, plus a date and time of the event. Click ‘View technical details’ for a fuller description. Make a note of key details, such as the application name, any ‘faulting modules’, and exception codes, then skip to step 3 to see if you can track down any potential solutions online.