Generate A System Health Report In Vista
Windows Vista has some new tools to help in diagnosing problems with your system. Yes there are still the familiar ones such as Event Viewer, Task Manager, and Performance Monitor, but Vista has improved upon these standards and added new diagnostic tools as well. One very cool on was previously covered by The Geek which is the Memory Diagnostics Tool. Here I am going to cover an often overlooked but extremely convenient tool which is generating a System Health Report.
To generate this report click on Start and type in “Performance” (without the quotes) and then at the top click on Performance Information and Tools.
Next click on Advanced tools …
This will open up an entire list of Performance Tools we can use to help diagnose problems with our system. Instead of going through different utilities on the list go to the bottom and generate a System Health Report.
To generate the report it takes about a minute or so. You get to look at a cool graphic (well, I guess I don’t know how cool it is but it’s something new at least). while Vista collect system information.
On this report it is telling me a test on one of my drives failed, well it is because of low disk space and this drive is external … so you need to look at these reports carefully and not get too excited when you see a failed test.
On the other hand, if something is detected such as a corrupt driver for instance, you will definitely want to make sure and correct that. As you go deeper into each section of the report you get a lot of information, far too much for me to show in this post. Even if you are not experiencing any obvious troubles I would probably run this report periodically as it could provide information that will allow you to catch something small before it grows into a larger issue.
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cool think, for everyone with a german vista you find that under "Systemsteuerung - Leistungsinformationen und -tools - Weitere Tools - Systemintegritätsbericht erstellen"
I love your site, it is so educational. May I please link it to my blog.
Hi Geek,
Your blogs are so useful, especially changing Vista start button to switch off rather than hibernate! This is another great guide, keep up the excellant work.
Love the site
An excellent article.I was more than happy several mos.ago.I wasn't sure if my computer was functioning properly;I ran the health check-received a good report;problem was a microsoft issue.Several days later MS released a patch for this.It was for not being able to access the internet.No problem since.
Hi,
First, I wanted to say how MUCH I appreciate all the work and effort and love you put into this website. It has made getting to know Vista ever so much easier for me.
Ok, I tried your tip on this page, and it opened a blank explorer window, with the "wait" symbol going and going, and when I tried to restart it, it crashed explorer, and then when I tried again, nothing happened again, and I tried closing it and it crashed explorer AGAIN, so I guess my Vista doesn't want me to see it's health…
But it looked so interesting I wanted to. Any ideas why it just kept crashing explorer and never did go past choosing the … tools option after typing in performance?
Thanks again for a fabulous, helpful, amazing website!
Donna
@Donna:
Thank you for the kind comments! We definitely appreciate it.
As far as your problem … there are several factors that could be causing the issue. I recommend going to our forum and asking there. Then we can get additional information from you and there are a lot more helpful geeks who will be able to help you out! Not only that … but it is a fun place to hang out from time to time.
http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/
Nice article. I tried it but the report keeps telling me that the security centre cannot identify an anti-virus product running. When I visit the security centre it tells me that I have McAffee running. Why does this happen? If I have to 'fiddle' around to figure this out then I would say that Microsoft has produced malfunctioning software. The consumer public should never stand for this with the prices we have to pay.
Great suggestion. Do you know how I might schedule this to run automatically at a specified time? I have tried everything I can think of, but so far I haven't been able to create a shortcut or batchfile to use w/ Taskmanager in order to do this.
hi, you got some deeply pleasant posts here
very useful and reassuring facts