How To Use The Diagnostic Tools In Windows 7

Microsoft Windows 7 has some cool new tools we can use to diagnose the health of our system. Some of the new tools include the Memory Diagnostics Tool, Network Diagnostics Tool, Startup Repair and the Reliability and Performance Monitor. There are still the old stand by tools such as Event Viewer, Task Manager, Disk Defragmenter etc. Today we will discuss generating a system health report to see if our hardware is up to the everday tasks we expect from it.

To generate a system health report do the following:

• Click Start. In the search box type in Performance as illustrated below.

• When finished typing in Performance you will notice a new link at the top of the window titled Performance Information and Tools as illustrated below.

• Next, click the performance information and tools link. Then in the left window pane click on Advanced tools as illustrated below.

• Now we can see a list of tools we can use to diagnose our system problems. Next, scroll down the list and click on the link titled Generate a System Health Report as illustrated below.

Keep in mind it may take a few minutes to generate the report. You should see a progress bar while it is performing the tests like the one below.

As you can see from the illustration below the system health report contains a lot of valuable information.

If the information is telling you things like hard disk failure is imminent, then you should probably take heed to the message and get a new hard drive. You will notice it gives you information about the devices in your system and also has suggestions on fixing the problems. I would get in the habit of running the report at least once a month or every couple of weeks.