Vista Event Viewer

The Vista Event Viewer records system, security, and application events. Any significant occurrence in the system, or in an application, that requires user notification would be considered an "event". These event logs can provide you with information about every aspect of your PC including hardware, software, security, and system components. They can also help you identify the source of your system problems.

To open the Vista Event Viewer console, click on the Windows (Start) button, type Event Viewer into the search box and then left-click on "Event Viewer" in the results area as shown.

That will bring you to the Vista Event Viewer console shown below.

If you are familiar with the Windows XP version of Event Viewer, you'll notice that the Vista version is somewhat different. The new Event Viewer is a Computer Geek's dream with all sorts of information available, along with various ways of sorting the data.

For our purposes, and to keep my promise of keeping things simple, we'll take the new Event Viewer and select a few items that may be most important to you. First, to simplify things just a bit, let's go to the left pane window and click on the arrow next to "Windows Logs". This will expand Windows Logs into sub-categories that you may be more familiar with, such as, Application, Security, and System. These sub-categories are found in the Windows XP version of Event Viewer.

As shown below, we have clicked on the Application sub-category and can view the contents in the middle pane window. Here you can see all of the Informational, Warning, and Error messages collected from Applications on your PC.

Under the list is a window with more detail about that particular message. The same as you would get if you double-clicked on the message itself. These messages provide specifics about the error that may help point you in the right direction as far as solving the problem.

In the right-hand pane is a list of various Actions that can be taken on the current log, including opening a saved log, creating a custom view of the log, clearing the log completely, and filtering the log to check for specific message types.

If you have a curious nature and would like to click around all of the various new features of Vista Event Viewer, please be my guest. The important thing to remember is, if you are having a problem with your computer, go to the Event Viewer and check the Application Log and the System Log. They may be able to tell you what is causing your PC issue.

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