Reviewing events
To discover what’s happening, or has happened in your computer, you can review the Windows Event Log. The Event Log, is a chronicle of the computer’s activities. It may reveal the source of trouble, confirm your suspicions, or point you in the right direction, when you just don’t know what the heck is going on. To peruse those events, you need to know how to view the event viewer logs.
How to View the Event Viewer Logs
Tap the Windows key, and type Event Viewer. To open the event viewer of windows. The Event Viewer window is organized in a hierarchical structure, shown on the left side of the window.
The center pane shows details. The right pane lists actions. I recommend that you maximize the window, as shown in the picture, to take in all the information.
Windows Logs
Choose a log file to view. For example, if you just experienced something odd, or if the computer has experienced something odd, say a program has crashed, or you saw an error message about the PC’s hardware, you choose, the System Log.
Open Windows logs, and choose System. It may take a few moments for the log to populate, when the log appears, you may see the detailed information. Log entries are sorted by date and time; the source indicates which programs are process generated the message, those are informational items as you can see in the picture above. A yellow triangle indicates a warning. A red circle shows as error.
To get more information select the item and see relevant information in the bottom part of the window. Read the reason of the error and see if that is relevant to the issue you are experiencing, so it will confirm what to blame, such as failing network adapter or perhaps a corrupt file.
Now don’t be anxious at warnings and errors, a lot of them are routine and windows recovers, also not every incidence is flagged by an error. For instance, recently my PC restarted in the middle of a game, when I checked the logs, I just found an unexpected shutdown message which was recorded after the fact. I can only assume that the PC got too hot or perhaps the game software crushed which caused my PC to restart and it didn’t happen again so the cause is anyone’s guess.
Custom Views
The custom views part of the event viewers contains specific information based on filters.
How to create custom view
You can create your own filter for any specific item on the log. For instance, you want a monitor of all hardware errors in one place, to do so, choose the Create Custom View from the list of actions in the right hand of the event viewer window. Choose only the most serious error types: Critical and Error, select the hardware events log as shown in the picture, click OK.
type a name for the new view, then click OK to create your own custom viewer. Now the custom view is empty, later when I come and check the filters information it will show me critical information related to hardware of my PC.
Conclusion:
When reviewing the logs keep in mind that the warning errors and other entries aren’t necessarily a signal of impending doom in your computer. If you view the logs frequently, you will find a lot of item’s flag that happened interrupted your work. Remember you don’t need to take action or over react to the warnings and errors, in most cases the windows deals with the problems, so, you don’t need to do anything, but when you are having a problem, checking the event viewer can help you find out the source or at least better understand what is going on.