Troubleshooting Windows 7 With Microsoft's Built-In Tools
Firefox on Windows 7 had been behaving...oddly. The app would simply stop working and exit to the desktop. Yet, parts of the Firefox kernel would remain in memory, making it impossible to restart the application without firing up Task Manager and manually killing the process. It happened a half dozen times a day. I was beginning to contemplate a browser change.
Then I saw a message in the Windows Action Center. But more about that shortly.
By most measures (sales figures, user satisfaction, OEM pickup) Windows 7 has been a major success for Microsoft. But no operating system is perfect, and you will encounter problems on occasion. The vast array of hardware, drivers, and applications available for Windows necessarily means that issues will inevitably crop up.
The good news: Windows 7 gives you a robust set of tools to track down problems you encounter. We’ll take a look at a number of those tools, and how they can help you in your problem solving.
Given the complexity of the modern PC, it’s easy to think that any issue you encounter is an OS issue. I once had a user contact me about a technical issue back in the Windows XP era. He raged at some length about how poorly Microsoft had designed Windows, and how Windows needed to do a better job of helping him troubleshoot his PC. His actual problem turned out to be a bad southbridge. His USB controller had apparently died, so the system never made it past the POST, locking on the USB enumeration phase. I’m not sure how Windows could have helped him with that particular problem. Anyway...
My point is that you need to have some basic understanding of the problem you’re encountering. On top of that, you need to keep a clear head and dispassionate attitude during the problem solving process. After you’re up and running again, feel free to swear blue clouds at the real culprit; it makes me feel better when I do.
However, Windows even helps with at least one fundamental hardware problem: finicky memory. Both Vista and Windows 7 shipped with a surprisingly robust memory diagnostic, included on the Windows setup DVD. It’s not as granular as something like Memtest86+, but will certainly tell you if you’re running into memory problems or if your Windows setup issues may be due to something other than RAM failures. You can run the Windows memory diagnostics tool by either booting from the setup DVD or by typing “mdsched.exe” in the Run window. It doesn’t actually run in Windows, so you’ll need to reboot after scheduling a test run.
When you’re running Windows, problems you encounter typically span a discrete set of categories:
With these thoughts in mind, let’s take a look at some of the tools available within Windows 7 to assist you in your detective work.
Then I saw a message in the Windows Action Center. But more about that shortly.
By most measures (sales figures, user satisfaction, OEM pickup) Windows 7 has been a major success for Microsoft. But no operating system is perfect, and you will encounter problems on occasion. The vast array of hardware, drivers, and applications available for Windows necessarily means that issues will inevitably crop up.
The good news: Windows 7 gives you a robust set of tools to track down problems you encounter. We’ll take a look at a number of those tools, and how they can help you in your problem solving.
Given the complexity of the modern PC, it’s easy to think that any issue you encounter is an OS issue. I once had a user contact me about a technical issue back in the Windows XP era. He raged at some length about how poorly Microsoft had designed Windows, and how Windows needed to do a better job of helping him troubleshoot his PC. His actual problem turned out to be a bad southbridge. His USB controller had apparently died, so the system never made it past the POST, locking on the USB enumeration phase. I’m not sure how Windows could have helped him with that particular problem. Anyway...
My point is that you need to have some basic understanding of the problem you’re encountering. On top of that, you need to keep a clear head and dispassionate attitude during the problem solving process. After you’re up and running again, feel free to swear blue clouds at the real culprit; it makes me feel better when I do.
However, Windows even helps with at least one fundamental hardware problem: finicky memory. Both Vista and Windows 7 shipped with a surprisingly robust memory diagnostic, included on the Windows setup DVD. It’s not as granular as something like Memtest86+, but will certainly tell you if you’re running into memory problems or if your Windows setup issues may be due to something other than RAM failures. You can run the Windows memory diagnostics tool by either booting from the setup DVD or by typing “mdsched.exe” in the Run window. It doesn’t actually run in Windows, so you’ll need to reboot after scheduling a test run.
When you’re running Windows, problems you encounter typically span a discrete set of categories:
- Hardware stability issues (not driver related). For example, extreme overclocking may introduce stability problems. Similarly, system overheating or insufficient power supply problems can crop up under heavy loads.
- Application compatibility or app bugs. These range from simple problems, like UI bugs, to more serious issues, such as memory leaks.
- Driver issues. The most common driver issues you will encounter are graphics driver instability, followed by sound driver problems.
- Windows bugs. That’s right, Windows actually has the occasional bug. Really.
- Integration problems. This is the most difficult problem to track down, and can be due to a host of different issues. After you’ve installed and uninstalled large numbers of applications and multiple different pieces of hardware, you may have multiple DLLs, Visual C++ redistributables, weird registry entries, driver traces, and incompletely-uninstalled applications. All can contribute to Windows stability problems or just make Windows perform more poorly than a clean installation.
With these thoughts in mind, let’s take a look at some of the tools available within Windows 7 to assist you in your detective work.
Assuming your installation of Windows is actually running, the place to begin your hunt for a solution is the Windows Action Center. You’ll typically first encounter the Action Center as a small flag with an alert icon in your system tray.
The Action Center is a one-stop shop for Windows notifications.
Just click on the flag, then click on “Open Action Center.”
The Action Center is really only a starting place.
The key area you’ll want to explore is under "maintenance." See those messages? Note in particular the one that reads “Address a problem with ATI Graphics Driver.”
At the time, I was running an early beta of the Radeon HD 5870 driver. Removing that and installing the shipping Catalyst 9.11 driver cured a number of stability issues with several games.
Now let’s revisit my problem with Firefox.
The third one down, "Address a problem with Skype extension for Firefox" is another key message. As I noted earlier, I’d been having substantial stability issues with Firefox 3.5. Firefox would crash mysteriously, but the core Firefox process would “stick” in memory. I’d have to bring up task manager and manually kill the Firefox process. After disabling the Skype extension, most of my Firefox problems miraculously cleared up.
The Action Center is useful, but sometimes it’s too much of a nag. That little flagged exclamation point pops up when Windows wants to check for updates, if you haven’t backed up the system, and other actions useful for average users, but less useful for power users. You can tweak Action Center to only pop up with messages you consider important.
Tweak the Windows Action Center to tell you only the warnings you think are necessary – or not at all, if that’s your preference.
The Action Center can get you started, particularly with driver or applications issues. But it’s possible that you’ll need to dig deeper.
The Action Center is a one-stop shop for Windows notifications.
Just click on the flag, then click on “Open Action Center.”
The Action Center is really only a starting place.
The key area you’ll want to explore is under "maintenance." See those messages? Note in particular the one that reads “Address a problem with ATI Graphics Driver.”
At the time, I was running an early beta of the Radeon HD 5870 driver. Removing that and installing the shipping Catalyst 9.11 driver cured a number of stability issues with several games.
Now let’s revisit my problem with Firefox.
The third one down, "Address a problem with Skype extension for Firefox" is another key message. As I noted earlier, I’d been having substantial stability issues with Firefox 3.5. Firefox would crash mysteriously, but the core Firefox process would “stick” in memory. I’d have to bring up task manager and manually kill the Firefox process. After disabling the Skype extension, most of my Firefox problems miraculously cleared up.
The Action Center is useful, but sometimes it’s too much of a nag. That little flagged exclamation point pops up when Windows wants to check for updates, if you haven’t backed up the system, and other actions useful for average users, but less useful for power users. You can tweak Action Center to only pop up with messages you consider important.
Tweak the Windows Action Center to tell you only the warnings you think are necessary – or not at all, if that’s your preference.
The Action Center can get you started, particularly with driver or applications issues. But it’s possible that you’ll need to dig deeper.
If Action Center does pop up with a message that it’s found a problem, clicking on the problem itself will pop up a solutions window. If appropriate, you can have Windows itself try to find and fix the problem. In the case of my Skype extention for Firefox issue, the options were actually appropriate.
Windows 7 possible solutions are sometimes actually useful!
Windows will happily try to check for solutions for every perceived problem. If you look at the "Check for Solutions" control panel applet, it can seem a little daunting.
Wait, isn’t Windows 7 supposed to be more stable?
At first blush, this seems like I had a huge number of problems. Wasn’t Windows 7 supposed to be more stable?
In fact, it is. Many of those issues were reported shortly after I’d installed Windows 7 and associated applications, but before I’d updated all those apps. The problems reported with Outlook, for example, have disappeared since I updated Office.
Windows 7 possible solutions are sometimes actually useful!
Windows will happily try to check for solutions for every perceived problem. If you look at the "Check for Solutions" control panel applet, it can seem a little daunting.
Wait, isn’t Windows 7 supposed to be more stable?
At first blush, this seems like I had a huge number of problems. Wasn’t Windows 7 supposed to be more stable?
In fact, it is. Many of those issues were reported shortly after I’d installed Windows 7 and associated applications, but before I’d updated all those apps. The problems reported with Outlook, for example, have disappeared since I updated Office.
One other option available under the Maintenance tab of the action center is a link labeled "View Reliability History." This brings up a screen that allows you to track system problems and frequency over time.
The Windows Reliability Monitor tracks system problems and frequency over time.
While "Check for Solutions" has improved over time, it’s still not perfect. There are times when you need to manually grab a new update or driver.
The reliability monitor doesn’t point out trends, but looking at system problems over time does allow you to interpolate trends on your own. Sometimes you may encounter seemingly disparate problems that actually have a common cause.
Recently, for example, I’ve been having an issue with the PC RPG Dragon Age: Origins. The sound in the game would stop working. Okay, so maybe my sound drivers were behaving oddly. But if I examine earlier dates in the Reliability Monitor, I see no Dragon Age issues.
At the same time, I’d been running into other issues. USB ports would randomly stop working. Every now and then, I’d lose my network connection. The frequency of these sorts of events has been increasing over time.
This finally led me to the conclusion that my motherboard's I/O Controller Hub was starting to fail. USB, some PCI Express lanes, and networking all hang off ICH10 on my X58 motherboard. So I’ve ordered up a new motherboard to replace it.
The Windows Reliability Monitor tracks system problems and frequency over time.
While "Check for Solutions" has improved over time, it’s still not perfect. There are times when you need to manually grab a new update or driver.
The reliability monitor doesn’t point out trends, but looking at system problems over time does allow you to interpolate trends on your own. Sometimes you may encounter seemingly disparate problems that actually have a common cause.
Recently, for example, I’ve been having an issue with the PC RPG Dragon Age: Origins. The sound in the game would stop working. Okay, so maybe my sound drivers were behaving oddly. But if I examine earlier dates in the Reliability Monitor, I see no Dragon Age issues.
At the same time, I’d been running into other issues. USB ports would randomly stop working. Every now and then, I’d lose my network connection. The frequency of these sorts of events has been increasing over time.
This finally led me to the conclusion that my motherboard's I/O Controller Hub was starting to fail. USB, some PCI Express lanes, and networking all hang off ICH10 on my X58 motherboard. So I’ve ordered up a new motherboard to replace it.
One of the major sources of problems with any new operating system release is compatibility with existing applications. The problem, of course, is that not all apps written for older versions of Windows will run on a newer version.
The compatibility troubleshooter helps you determine if an app will run under Windows 7, whether it needs tweaks, or if it will run at all. However, it’s not a particularly user-friendly tool.
You can get to the compatibility troubleshooter from within the Windows Action Center by clicking on the Troubleshooting link at the bottom of the pane. This takes you to the Troubleshooting control panel page. The top entry is "Programs: Run programs made for earlier versions of Windows."
When you run this, you get a huge list of all applications installed on your system, not just the ones that Windows thinks may be incompatible. If you’re like me, that means wading through a very, very long list. However, I knew of one older application that would have problems: Nikon Transfer, which came on a CD with my Nikon D300 digital SLR.
You can actually fix compatibility issues with the compatibility troubleshooter.
After clicking through the buttons, the compatibility troubleshooter set up Nikon Transfer to run as a Windows XP SP2 app. At that point, it ran without any hitches under 64-bit Windows 7.
The troubleshooter isn’t perfect, though. For example, it assigned Steam as an app that should run as if it were a Windows Vista mode. Steam complained about this, popping up a message telling me in no uncertain terms that compatibility mode for Steam was a bad idea, so I manually set it to run as a native application.
Of course, the right way to run the troubleshooter is every time you install an application--at least, one that hasn’t been written with Windows 7 in mind. And you can, of course, right click on any application executable and manually change compatibility settings. But the troubleshooter does a pretty good job of automagically setting up the right compatibility mode.
The compatibility troubleshooter helps you determine if an app will run under Windows 7, whether it needs tweaks, or if it will run at all. However, it’s not a particularly user-friendly tool.
You can get to the compatibility troubleshooter from within the Windows Action Center by clicking on the Troubleshooting link at the bottom of the pane. This takes you to the Troubleshooting control panel page. The top entry is "Programs: Run programs made for earlier versions of Windows."
When you run this, you get a huge list of all applications installed on your system, not just the ones that Windows thinks may be incompatible. If you’re like me, that means wading through a very, very long list. However, I knew of one older application that would have problems: Nikon Transfer, which came on a CD with my Nikon D300 digital SLR.
You can actually fix compatibility issues with the compatibility troubleshooter.
After clicking through the buttons, the compatibility troubleshooter set up Nikon Transfer to run as a Windows XP SP2 app. At that point, it ran without any hitches under 64-bit Windows 7.
The troubleshooter isn’t perfect, though. For example, it assigned Steam as an app that should run as if it were a Windows Vista mode. Steam complained about this, popping up a message telling me in no uncertain terms that compatibility mode for Steam was a bad idea, so I manually set it to run as a native application.
Of course, the right way to run the troubleshooter is every time you install an application--at least, one that hasn’t been written with Windows 7 in mind. And you can, of course, right click on any application executable and manually change compatibility settings. But the troubleshooter does a pretty good job of automagically setting up the right compatibility mode.
The Windows Resource Monitor is a useful tool for monitoring overall resource use under Windows. It’s actually not as useful as it was under Windows XP, where power users could easily exhaust available system handles. Still, it’s interesting to check out overall system resource usage; it can help you, for example, determine if adding more memory might be a good thing.
More useful is the Computer Management Console. You can run this by bringing up the Run window and typing "compmgmt.msc."
Computer Management is a central place for accessing many system admin functions.
From the main management window, you can get to a number of useful tools. Using this applet is worth an article or several just by itself, so we’ll mention just a couple of tools in passing.
The first is the System Diagnostics panel, which is under Performance -> System -> System Diagnostics. There’s a wealth of data here to drill into, and most of it, even the ones flagged as errors, aren’t really all that useful. But you do occasionally find nuggets of information that can lead you to problem solutions.
The Services panel (Services and Applications -> Services) shows you a list of services that are running or dormant. This has proven useful a couple of times. For example, I had an early version of Acronis True Image that I’d installed and uninstalled. When I checked the services panel, I found the Acronis License manager running, and consuming memory and resources. So I had to track it down and uninstall it.
System Information is another moderately useful tool, which you can run by typing "msinfo32.exe" in the run window. The most useful bit here is the "Problem Devices" listing. In this example, I’ve got an extra copy of my printer set up, but not active, so I need to uninstall it. I also have a PS/2 keyboard port with nothing attached. This is a little more useful than trying to peruse the Device Manager listings.
System Information lets you check out the state of your hardware.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of system troubleshooting tools in Windows 7. We haven’t touched on the performance monitor, event viewer, or (if you have Microsoft Office installed), Microsoft Office Diagnostics. All can be useful, depending on how deep you want to dive and what types of problems you’re encountering.
Understanding what tools are available, however, should help you better solve problems you encounter. The tools in Windows 7 are more comprehensive and easier to use than past versions as well. So before you reach for the phone to call tech support, maybe diving into one of these tools may save you some time and money, plus give you the satisfaction of solving your own problems.
More useful is the Computer Management Console. You can run this by bringing up the Run window and typing "compmgmt.msc."
Computer Management is a central place for accessing many system admin functions.
From the main management window, you can get to a number of useful tools. Using this applet is worth an article or several just by itself, so we’ll mention just a couple of tools in passing.
The first is the System Diagnostics panel, which is under Performance -> System -> System Diagnostics. There’s a wealth of data here to drill into, and most of it, even the ones flagged as errors, aren’t really all that useful. But you do occasionally find nuggets of information that can lead you to problem solutions.
The Services panel (Services and Applications -> Services) shows you a list of services that are running or dormant. This has proven useful a couple of times. For example, I had an early version of Acronis True Image that I’d installed and uninstalled. When I checked the services panel, I found the Acronis License manager running, and consuming memory and resources. So I had to track it down and uninstall it.
System Information is another moderately useful tool, which you can run by typing "msinfo32.exe" in the run window. The most useful bit here is the "Problem Devices" listing. In this example, I’ve got an extra copy of my printer set up, but not active, so I need to uninstall it. I also have a PS/2 keyboard port with nothing attached. This is a little more useful than trying to peruse the Device Manager listings.
System Information lets you check out the state of your hardware.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of system troubleshooting tools in Windows 7. We haven’t touched on the performance monitor, event viewer, or (if you have Microsoft Office installed), Microsoft Office Diagnostics. All can be useful, depending on how deep you want to dive and what types of problems you’re encountering.
Understanding what tools are available, however, should help you better solve problems you encounter. The tools in Windows 7 are more comprehensive and easier to use than past versions as well. So before you reach for the phone to call tech support, maybe diving into one of these tools may save you some time and money, plus give you the satisfaction of solving your own problems.
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