Personalizing and Configuring Windows 7 : Performance Tweaks (part 3) - Monitoring Performance and Reliability

5. Monitoring Performance and Reliability

Windows has had a Performance Monitor since the earliest days of NT, but with Windows Vista, Microsoft debuted an amazing new utility, the Reliability Monitor, which tracks the overall reliability of your PC over time, ever since the first day you booted. Both utilities used to be part of a combined Reliability and Performance Monitor tool, but now, in Windows 7, they exist as separate tools. You can access the Reliability Monitor, shown in Figure 5, by typing relia into Start Menu Search.

Figure 5. Another hidden wonder: the Reliability Monitor.

The Reliability Monitor assigns a reliability rating to your PC on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is horrible and 10 is perfect. Out of the box, Windows 7 gets a perfect 10 but from there on its all downhill: any glitch or failure in any application, hardware, or Windows will cause the reliability rating to plummet. Meanwhile, days with no problems are barely rewarded, with only a slight bump. If anything, we think Windows is being too hard on itself.

Consider Figure 6. Here you see a decidedly different reliability picture, a PC on which multiple applications have failed, repeatedly, over a period of time. While you can't see it in this window, the reliability rating of this machine is sad.

Figure 6. Ouch. Windows 7 is painfully honest about unreliable systems.

What went wrong with this disaster of a PC? We must be miserable using that machine, right? Not exactly. The Reliability Monitor shown in Figure 6 is from a daily-use desktop PC. This machine is used to test a wide range of software, and many of the application failures are related to beta versions of a single application that was known to have issues at the time. You can see individual problems by clicking on dates and viewing what went wrong, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7. Dive in and you can see where Windows—or, more likely, a third-party application—let you down.

That's what's beautiful about the Reliability Monitor. It gives you a place to see exactly what is causing the problems. Then you can take steps to fix those problems. (In this case, that simply meant waiting for an updated version of the poorly performing application.)

This illustrates why we think the Reliability Monitor is a bit harsh. Over the period shown, this PC was actually quite reliable.