3 important Windows instruments for troubleshooting (and how you can use them)

Personal computer systems was once the area of hobbyists, who had no downside rolling up their sleeves and diving into debuggers to determine why one thing wasn’t working as anticipated.

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Today, PCs are enterprise productiveness instruments designed for an viewers that has neither the endurance nor the technical background to fiddle with code or go spelunking within the registry when one thing goes mistaken. If that is you, then you definitely’ll be happy to know that there are a handful of built-in diagnostic and restore instruments in Windows 10 and Windows 11 that may get you again to work shortly. They provide a wealth of troubleshooting info in addition to (if you happen to’re fortunate) straightforward options.

Even if you happen to assume these troubleshooting instruments, hold studying. You may uncover a brand new trick or two.

1. Task Manager

The identify of this app, which dates again to the earliest days of Windows, significantly undersells its worth within the trendy period. Yes, it provides a listing of working applications, full with a solution to terminate an app with excessive prejudice if that app begins misbehaving.

But it additionally has some wonderful performance-monitoring capabilities that may assist you determine why your laptop computer is all of a sudden struggling. And it would not require any refined technical information.

How to make use of it:

Right-click any empty house on the taskbar and click on Task Manager. Or open the Quick Link menu (right-click Start or press Windows key + X), and click on the Task Manager entry. Or use Task Manager’s keyboard shortcut, Ctrl + Shift + Esc.

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In Windows 11, Task Manager has a navigation menu on the left, with every possibility representing a unique web page. Use these choices to shortly swap from the Processes web page, with its per-app view of useful resource utilization, to the Performance tab, which provides one more set of tabs, every with a really detailed view of CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, and GPU utilization.

And look! In Windows 11, you need to use Task Manager in darkish mode.

What you are able to do with it:

There’s an outstanding quantity of element on every Task Manager tab. Armed with that info, you possibly can:

• Identify apps or processes which can be slowing down your PC. The Performance tabs will inform you if a system useful resource (CPU or reminiscence, for instance) is repeatedly hitting 100% beneath sure workloads. Switch to the Processes tab after which go away it open and visual as you’re employed, so you possibly can see which apps are inflicting essentially the most stress.
• Kill a misbehaving or hung program. If a program is nonresponsive and also you’re happy you have waited lengthy sufficient, choose its identify from beneath the Apps heading after which click on End Task.
• Restart the Windows shell (Explorer.exe). If the taskbar, Start, File Manager, and different components of the Windows shell cease responding to enter, use the keyboard shortcut to open Task Manager and choose Windows Explorer on the Processes tab. At the highest of the web page, click on Restart Task.

Power tip:

If you need Task Manager to at all times open exhibiting a selected tab, click on Settings within the decrease left nook and specify your alternative from the Default Start Page. (In Windows 10, use the Options > Set Default Tab menu.) On this web page, you may additionally discover an possibility to hurry up, decelerate, or pause the real-time counters on the Performance web page.

2. Powercfg

There’s often a reasonably large hole between the battery life a PC producer claims for the laptop computer it is making an attempt to promote you and what you find yourself getting. So, how do you get a extra correct image of your precise battery utilization, and how will you inform whether or not an app is utilizing extra of your battery than it has a proper to?

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That’s the place the Power Settings Command-Line Tool (Powercfg.exe) reveals its strengths.

How it really works:

Open a PowerShell or Command Prompt window after which sort powercfg adopted by the command you wish to run. For a full record of what instructions can be found, sort powercfg /? after which press Enter.

What you are able to do with it:

Find out why your PC drains the battery as a substitute of sleeping. If your system refuses to fall asleep (or wakes up inappropriately), the trigger is often an app or service that refuses to reply to a request from the system for sleep. Use the command powercfg /requests to see which course of is the offender.

Last 12 months, I had a Windows laptop computer that stored waking up when it ought to have been sleeping peacefully. The offender was a program known as dptf_helper.exe, which is a part of the Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework Utility Application. To clear up this downside, I used the next command:

powercfg /requestsoverride PROCESS dptf_helper.exe DISPLAY SYSTEM

You can see the complete syntax for this command by typing the next: powercfg /requestsoverride /?

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Get an in depth battery report. Use powercfg /batteryreport to generate an intensive report exhibiting details about battery utilization for the present system over time. Each battery report contains tables and charts exhibiting latest utilization, utilization historical past, battery capability over time, and battery life estimates. You do not want a deep technical background to collect helpful info from this report.

Power tip:

For extra on this command, in addition to different suggestions for getting higher battery life out of your Windows PC, see “How to maximise the battery lifetime of your Windows 10 PC”.

3. Reliability Monitor

When you open this app, you’ll get flashbacks to… properly, let’s name it 2006. Everything about it has the classic appear and feel of a long-gone Windows consumer expertise, proper right down to the truth that it is part of Control Panel, which is slowly being faraway from trendy variations of Windows.

And but this instrument hangs round, little doubt as a result of somebody in Redmond is aware of that it provides an indispensable show of troubleshooting info that even a nontechnical consumer can perceive.

How it really works:

To open Reliability Monitor, simply faucet the Windows key or click on Start after which begin typing reli. That needs to be sufficient to show the View Reliability History shortcut. To create a one-click shortcut, right-click any empty house on the desktop and select New > Shortcut; enter perfmon /rel on the primary web page of the Create Shortcut wizard, give the shortcut a descriptive identify (like Reliability Monitor) on the subsequent web page, after which click on Finish.

The show is organized by day, with every day getting its personal column within the prime of the window. Icons present various kinds of failures in addition to warnings you may obtain. The final row, Information, might be helpful as properly. Instead of specializing in failures, it reveals you actions like updates, app installations, and driver reconfigurations that had been profitable.

What you are able to do with it:

Find particulars a couple of crash. When an app crashes, you may not even concentrate on it, particularly if the app was designed to restart routinely after a failure. If Windows crashes, in fact, you may find out about it, particularly within the case of a Stop error, also called a bug examine or the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Whatever type of crash you are troubleshooting, open its occasion in Reliability Monitor and have a look at the technical particulars (for a BSOD, that is a code like 0x3 DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE). Those particulars is perhaps inscrutable, however additionally they may offer you sufficient info to craft a selected search that may flip up an answer.

Identify potential causes of crashes or slowdowns. If an app (or Windows itself) began misbehaving not too long ago, Reliability Monitor may also help you reply an important troubleshooting query — has something modified currently? If the crashes or hangs began on the tenth, have a look at the Information line for that day and some days earlier to see whether or not any new applications or drivers had been put in or up to date across the similar time. Sometimes rolling again the driving force set up or uninstalling the app may also help decide whether or not it’s inflicting the issues.

Power tip:

If you are troubleshooting another person’s PC, and wish to get a fast survey of what sort of issues it has been experiencing, click on View All Problem Reports on the backside of the principle program window. That shows a neatly formatted record, grouped by the supply of the issue reviews. 

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Double-click any merchandise in that record to see the technical particulars for the issue report. When you are working with technical assist workers to debug an issue, use the Copy To Clipboard button on the backside of one among these reviews to repeat these particulars and paste them right into a hassle ticket or an e mail.