Windows Vista provides some really interesting system, memory and network diagnostics tools.

You can also ask Reliability and Performance Monitor to check you system for errors and to generate a full report on all errors currently present on your system. If you are a PC maintenance technician, generating this report is a great item to add to a preventive maintenance script.

To generate this report, you need to click on Performance Information and Tools icon from Control Panel then click on Advanced tools item located on the left pane. On the window that will shown up, click on “Generate a system health report”. Windows will take a while to diagnose your computer and then it will show the report for your system, see Figure 10. A shortcut to this procedure is running c:windowssystem32perfmon.exe /report.

On Figure 10 you can see two of the problems found on our computer, a driver was missing for an installed device and no anti-virus software was installed.

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Figure 10: System health report.

If you want to take a look on this report later, you don’t need to re-run the report, which can take a while, as Windows has to look for errors on your PC. You can simply enter the Reliability and Performance Monitor (see previous page) and opening Reports, System, System Diagnostics on the left pane.

All Windows Vista versions (but Starter) bring also a memory diagnostics tool, which can test your RAM memory modules for physical errors. This feature is found clicking Administrative Tools icon on Control Panel, choosing “Memory Diagnostics Tool” from the window that will show up. This tool cannot be run under windows, so if you want to run it right away the system will need to reboot your computer in order to run it or you can schedule it to be run the next time you restart your computer.

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Figure 11: Windows Memory Diagnostics Tool.

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Figure 12: Memory Diagnostics Tool testing the system’s memory.

Windows will ask you to run its built-in memory diagnostics tool if your computer crashes and it thinks that the cause is a faulty memory module.

All Windows Vista versions (but Starter) bring also a network diagnostics tool, which can be accessed thru the new icon Networking and Sharing Center found on Control Panel (Figure 13). There you can also configure several settings for your network. For checking why your network isn’t working, click on Diagnose and repair item found on the left pane. If you pay close attention to Figure 13 you will notice that our computer is correctly connected to our local network but our network isn’t correctly connected to the Internet. This can be seen as there is a red “x” on the wire connecting the network icon to the Internet icon. After diagnosing Windows came to the conclusion that there was some error with our DNS configuration (in fact the problem was that our broadband modem was turned off).

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Figure 13: Networking and Sharing Center.

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Figure 14: Windows diagnosing a problem with our network.

Windows Vista will also let you know if something is wrong with your hard disk drive before a more serious error occurs, allowing you to backup all your data before your HDD burns (this feature, however, isn’t available on the capped Starter edition).

This new Windows version has also an icon called Problem Reports and Solutions on Control Panel, which allows you to take a look on all errors that occurred on your PC and what Microsoft suggested to fix these errors, if they were sent to them.