Power tools for IT pros

Performance and troubleshooting tools

By far the largest group of Windows tools and accessories is intended to provide information about system performance as well as diagnostic tools that can help you to identify the cause of reliability problems. In this book, I include separate chapters for four professional-strength tools that fall into the following categories:

• Event Viewer (Chapter 4) There’s a log for nearly everything in Windows, which makes Event Viewer indispensable and potentially overwhelming. I have some suggestions to zero-in on the exact information you need to solve a problem.

• Task Manager and Resource Monitor (Chapter 5) Anyone moving to Windows 10 from Windows 7 should be pleasantly surprised by the improvements in Task Manager. This chapter also includes details about Resource Monitor, a separate accessory that you can access on the Performance tab in Task Manager.

• Sysinternals Suite (Chapter 7) This amazing and powerful collection of utilities (nearly 80 in all) is regularly updated and available for you to download for free. My discussion includes three absolute essentials.

• Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset (Chapter 8) Among the top 10, this choice is unique in that it’s not available to every Windows 10 user. But if your organization has a Volume Licensing contract with Software Assurance, or if you have access to a Visual Studio subscription, this collection of tools is a must-have troubleshooting resource.

A few other useful tools didn’t make the cut but are worth a mention here.

You can think of Reliability Monitor, for example, as a highly filtered version of Event Viewer. It lists successful and failed software and driver installations as well as crashes, apps, and programs that stopped responding, and other errors, on a time-based scale. It can often provide important clues about the cause of sudden changes in system behavior. Figure 1-7 shows a typical display, with events presented in a weekly rather than daily view.

FIGURE 1-7 Reliability Monitor can help pinpoint clusters of events that might provide clues to the cause of a sudden change in performance or an outbreak of crashes and nonresponsive apps.

Although it’s not immediately obvious, double-clicking any event listed at the bottom of Reliability Monitor opens a more detailed display of information, such as that shown in Figure 1-8. You can use error messages, codes, and other details to search for more information about the issue.

FIGURE 1-8 Double-clicking an event in Reliability Monitor provides important clues that you can use when troubleshooting problems and performance issues.

Another tool that should be familiar to longtime Windows users, especially if you have had to troubleshoot problems with a user’s PC, is System Configuration (MSConfig.exe). One especially useful capability is on the Services tab, shown in Figure 1-9, with which you can disable third-party services, either one at a time or in batches, and then restart to narrow-down the cause of a problem.

FIGURE 1-9 You can use the venerable System Configuration tool (also known as MSConfig) for basic troubleshooting tasks such as temporarily disabling services to narrow down the possible cause of a problem.

Here’s a power tip for using System Configuration: At the bottom of the Services tab, select the Hide All Microsoft Services check box, and then click Disable All and restart. If the problem no longer occurs, you’ve narrowed-down the cause to a third-party service.

Finally, there’s the Powercfg command, an odd beast that is extremely useful for isolating the cause of an overactive portable PC that isn’t getting the battery life you expect. Used with the /energy switch, it generates a profile of system activity over a period of 60 seconds and saves it as an HTML page in the current directory.