A lot of time can be spent searching through Event Viewer to find out what caused a recent crash or other problem – I’ve probably spent a good chunk of my life doing so. However, if you want to find out what crashed or caused a problem at a glance, you can use Windows’s built-in ‘Reliability Monitor’ to do so.
Simply search for ‘reliability’ in the start menu and you will see the following:
Open this up and it will show you a graph with a timeline and any notable events (Critical events, warnings and informational events), similar to Event Viewer.
From here you can click on the different days where the problems occurred and then click ‘View technical details’ to view a more detailed description on what happened, much like Event Viewer. Here’s what I see when I click ‘View technical details’ on the explorer.exe crash:
So if you are looking for a quick way to find out what problems have occurred or just to see what is regularly crashing, use Reliability Monitor. You can then use this information to help you use Event Viewer to investigate further.
