Windows 7 Tip of the Week
Windows has had a Performance Monitor since the earliest days of NT, but with Windows Vista, Microsoft added a great new utility, the Reliability Monitor, which tracks the overall reliability of your PC over time, keeping up to a year of PC use history. In Vista, the Performance Monitor and Reliability Monitor were part of a combined tool. But now, in Windows 7, they live as separate tools. You can access the Reliability Monitor, shown here, by typing relia into Start Menu Search.
The Reliability Monitor assigns a reliability rating to your PC on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is horrible and 10 is perfect. Out of the box, Windows 7 gets a perfect 10 but from there on its all downhill: Any glitch or failure in any application, hardware, or Windows will cause the reliability rating to immediately plummet. Meanwhile, days with no problems are barely rewarded, with only a slight upward bump. If anything, Microsoft is being too hard on itself, as most of these problems aren’t even the fault of Windows. But then, the Reliability Monitor isn’t monitoring just Windows. It’s monitoring everything on your PC.
