The Vista Reliability Monitor

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So how do you measure just how reliable your system is? If your computer is clean and fast and everything pops up nice and quick, you are a happy user. But performance and reliability are not the same. Your slower notebook may not be as fast as your desktop, but it could prove more reliable simple because you don’t tax it as hard or run as many programs. Windows Vista introduces a new way to measure reliability by providing the Reliability Monitor.

Performance Monitor has been around for a while, but making use of the information it could provide was an exercise more often associated with cramming for a Microsoft Certification exam. This tool has been overhauled and Reliability Monitor is really just one of the built-in reports it provides.

The Reliability and Performance Monitor is accessible from the Administrative Tools folder in the start menu, or by typing perfmon.msc in the search or run box (Win + R). Once open, select Reliability Monitor from the tree on the left of the window.

The Reliability Monitor tracks the overall stability of the system as well as “reliability events” which are those events that could affect stability or that may indicate instability. Such events include updates to Windows, software installation and removal, application crashes, device drivers that fail to load or unload, boot failures, disk and memory failures.

These changes are graphed out in a timeline and are used to measure system availability so you can see any changes visually. The chart provides a stability index that starts out at a value of 10 and goes down as failures on the system are encountered. Over time, a lack of recorded failures will result in this number climbing back up to that perfect 10. Events are indicated on the timeline by a info, warning or error icon. Clicking on the icon lets you see the details of the “event” so you can see just what happened at that time.