Using Event Viewer to Troubleshoot Microsoft Windows

It can be challenging to figure out the root of a problem on your computer. Those pesky little error messages programs can have. Sometimes the computer will freeze and you won't get an error message at all. When you do get an error message it can be quite cryptic.

There are many different ways you can approach an error message or troublesome behavior from a program. One method is using the Event Viewer. I'm going to give you an introduction to the Event Viewer and explain how it works.

When windows has an issue doing something or something goes wrong, quite often it will generate an error report and place it inside of the Event Viewer. You can then read the report and it may give you enough information to understand where the problem is.

To get to the Event Viewer, go into your control panel, administrative tools and then choose Event Viewer. You will need to be running Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 to make use of this application.

Once you open the Event Viewer you will notice three different categories (there may be more depending on what you have installed or what operating system you are running). The first category is Application. There is where information or errors from applications running on your computer will appear. The next category is Security. This is where successful and failed attempts at logging into your computer will appear. The last category is System. This is where information having to do with the system, such as windows and services are listed.

There are three different kinds of messages that appear under these categories. The first is an information message, which just lists information such as a service starting or stopping. The next is a warning, which lists non critical errors or failures. The last type of message is an error. These are considered critical errors or more serious errors. These are the most important type of messages to watch out for. Warnings and Errors should be investigated when having problems or error messages.

To get more information on the warning or error, double click the item and it will open in its own window. The date, time, source, type, and event id will be listed. The source will tell you which program or service is having the problem. There is also a description of the error and what went wrong below. Sometimes this is hard to understand but you can usually search for the description on Google or another search engine and find other people that are experiencing this problem and find out how they resolved it. There is a button you can push that will copy all of this information, making it easy to paste into an email to send to someone or post on a website.

There should also be a link in the description of the error or warning to a Microsoft website. This website lets you search for event id's and has possible causes and solutions to them.

You can right click on any of the categories and save the whole thing as a log file. This may be useful when making a post for help on a computer issue. Often people will ask that you list your event log files for review. You can also clear the log files by right clicking a category and choosing to clear all events.

That's how you use the Event Viewer in Microsoft Windows. Good luck.