Troubleshoot instantly with the Windows 7 System Diagnostic Report

You can delve into the Microsoft Windows 7’s Event Viewer to track down issues you are having with hardware and software, but doing so requires effort as well as an understanding of what you are looking at. Fortunately, Windows 7 comes with a host of troubleshooting tools, such as Event Viewer, Resource Monitor, and Reliability Monitor, that you can use to help diagnose all sorts of problems.

One of the other tools that you can use is called the System Diagnostic Report, which is a part of Performance Monitor and can display the status of hardware resources, system response times, and processes on your computer along with system information and configuration data. The neat trick with the System Diagnostic Report is that you can use it to gather troubleshooting information on-the-fly while the problem is occurring. Read more.

Keep tabs on ReadyBoost with Windows 7's Performance Monitor

In my last blog post, “Take a Closer Look at ReadyBoost Features in Windows 7,” I showed you how to set up ReadyBoost and explained how it works. Once you understand how ReadyBoost works and have it configured on your system, you’re obviously going to be looking for the promised performance gain. Unfortunately, ReadyBoost isn’t like adding rocket fuel to your system, and it’s not going to dramatically speed up every task that you regularly perform.

There are some tasks where the performance gain will be evident, and there are others where it will not. In other words, it is very difficult to be plugging away at some task on your system and just feel it kick in and say to yourself “Wow, there goes ReadyBoost! What a rush!”

To see ReadyBoost in action, you’re going to have to keep tabs on it with Windows 7’s Performance Monitor. Read more.