Thw windows event log is a good place to go if you wan't to feels depressed and stressed out for mostly no reason. Unless you actually know exactly what you're doing, or you're computer is acting up and you need something to google, dont go there. It's like the equivalent of trying to self diagnose an illness, there's always something wrong, the thing is not everything is neccecairly dangerous.
This is probably the most usefully informative text guide I have ever watched. You just potentially made me be able to diagnose any problems that I've ever experienced with Windows. Thank you so much!!
This area of Windows is a favourite for scammers in call centres. They call up unsuspecting non-technical people, remote onto their PC and open up the error log.. Then say "look these are problems, viruses in your computer" ... "Just fifty dollars to fix it yes?"
even if you choose to ignore an error, it is always best to know why the error exists, sometimes the error is actually a lie (amazingly often the error is a lie), but knowing why is important in pc repair, your customer will not be happy if they have the same problem in three weeks.
Thank you for this. It seems i had an unnecessary service trying to operate in the background, but was unable to do so because i had disabled other parts of Windows that it required. No more errors in my log :)
Tek Syndicate Great video! My favorite vids are the ones where I learn IT releated stuff especially about windows! I know about the event viewer but there were some things about it that I didnt know and now I do which helps me not only at home but at work as well! Oh, and I also think its great that Windell doesnt try and hide his face anymore. IDK why but it just seems better for the video :)
GreywolfStudios74 Agreed. When someone seems to be hiding something, there is a feeling that you can't entirely trust them, whether it is justified or not. It always seemed to be one of their "things" that Wendell was hidden behind a bank of monitors, but it becomes tiresome. Is he hiding from the law? Was his face chewed up in a farming accident? Is it Mel Gibson in a new career? I am relieved that they decided to end the subterfuge. It is a lot more practical for making different kinds of videos, and it is much more enjoyable to watch when the viewer isn't distracted with wondering why he is hidden. There is a place for shooting the shit, so to speak, with a nice cold one, but Wendell's videos are much more focused on what I am interested in. Hopefully we will see an increase in output.
The man said the words "just windows being windows" - the Level of things we put up with from windows - if it wasn't for games, we would have parted ways a while back
Thanks for this! I recently had to spend 3 weeks troubleshooting for blue screens on my rig, and spent a tonne of time on the event viewer, and taught myself a lot during that time, but its nice to have this as a favourite to go back to. For any interested, to find the blue screen I ended up replacing everything (even the mobo) and still had BS. The culprit in the end? Turns out my i5 was faulty after only 10 months. The more you know.
Tek Syndicate Yes. Thanks for this Wendell. I usually find that Windows event logs lines are so cryptic that it takes far too long (longer than it should) with Google to decrypt all the numeric information which looks scary, and ultimately isn't at all. But well done for illustrating the process. On mini-dumps, I've used debugging symbols to trace what was causing BSODs in *my* software. When the software is someone elses', I don't find that the Microsoft debugging tools tell me any more than I can get with the smaller, and IMHO easier Bluescreen View, from Nirsoft. I've introduced my team to it, and they seem to like it. Aside from anything else, it can show the Bluescreen, as XP would have done. They know what those looked like, and had some idea what the common errors where about, where the dump files are pretty alien to them. (or to anyone who hasn't done much software development on low-level Microsoft APIs) So, I'd recommend that for anyone who is new to this, or wants a tool on a USB flash drive, rather than pulling the dumps off onto the flash drive, or SMB admin share to view at the tech office.
David Cooltions Don't think so at all they just need to amp up the amount of video releases I know editing and getting the content ect takes time but they do need to hurry up.
It's where to look when you're running Windows servers. It's also pretty useful for coders, you can just dump your loggings there and have some kind of automation to look for your logs and perform monthly archive or something.
There's also, for the lazy, or phone support or whatever other reason you may find, whocrashed. It does most of the work for you...at least on a bsod, probably better only really when it's a software/driver problem. It helped me to find a webcam driver problem, and some other driver or software issue in the past(since I knew of the event viewer and dump files, bit not how to read them).
Great video! Now, exactly how heavily can this affect performance? YeALSO, when bluescreens hit, we are fixing the exact issues reported, correct? Cause then i got some more annoying problems with my current MOBO i am running. The bastard make certain applications crash when i go in and out of them. GPU/PCI express related i can only imagine. But i am a noob at this tho.
Yellow thats probably windows itself not closing programs correctly, id look at any recent windows update, or if you dont mind it. a fresh install will probably fix that.
Paul Smith It was a general question made before anything bad has gone down yet. Older gamers are well aware that re-installing Windows solve performance issues to some degree.
Cody Brown Can, but is not. I have done enough tests to know what and what is not causing certain issues. Regardless, this is not exactly about a problem, but a "what if" case-scenario.
If you're on 7 and you can't install the debugging tools, uninstall both C++ 2010 Redist packages, then install the debugging tools and then reinstall the current redistributables.
Reinstalled Win7 a couple of months ago. It took 3 tries to get a proper installation with all updates without having Windows somehow crapping out somewhere in the process. Now that it's installed and working, since February my event log is FILLED with errors and warnings, I'm talking 697 Errors, 925 Warnings and 10 Criticals (BSOD's) from all kinds of sources. Yay Windows. Oh, and none of them are related to the ones discussed in this video btw.
Stefan Falls The event log is what I referenced in my initial post. I haven't really dug in to it to find a root cause (I get errors from all kinds of sources) because I think I'll just try to reinstall once again instead. I like messing around with computers, but I prefer spending my time on working with them, not trying to get them to work.
It wasn't the same to reach that program through my copy of Win 7. A simple search of "computer management" brought me to it though easy enough. I couldn't find any errors or warnings for some odd crashes I've had though. It certainly made me aware of the ever present driver issue for my graphics tablet though... Wacom never addressed that, so sad.
I've been checking event viewer recently because I have a computer i put together ~2-3 months ago and it's been randomly freezing since start, although since it just freezes randomly (sometimes BSOD but more and more rare that it does that), it just says in event viewer that it unexpectedly crashed I am getting ntcskral.exe though when it bsod (tried switching all but cpu and motherboard), mainly occurs now when I try Prime95 tests (blend, large FFT) and freeze on small fft
***** That's bullshit and you know it... There have been Windows versions where BSOD were unavoidable, including the "oh so glorious Windows XP" in it's first year. XP SP0 was so unpredictable, and had so many compability issues, that even 98SE, and Me seemed to be the more stable options. Also, driver updates were many times the reason that lead to system issues. And BIOS updates for consumer hardware in the 90s and early 00s? Yeah, good luck... But hey, maybe you hopped from Win95 straight to NT, didn't switch to XP until SP2 was out, and just recently made the switch to 7. Although, even then it's highly unlikely you've never had a BSOD.
***** could b true if he stuck with simple basic hardware, blue screen will happen on occasion with higher end stuff more often. I never experienced one on my e-machine from high school
ChrisD4335 There was a time when unplugging an USB printer (which I'd consider pretty basic hardware) at the wrong time could turn your OS into a wet fart. Keep in mind, we're talking about the past 20, not just 10 years.
Thanks for the informative video! I will need this to share with others to give them the proper headstart to diagnosing their own system software and hardware. Steam forum is littered with uneducated PC users and most are downright malice and impatient when they encounter an errors. They often blame developers for their poorly managed system and some do treat PC like it's a console waiting for the patch expecting it will resolve their simple issue. I myself had issue as well with my video card before. The game would often restart or hang when executing DX11 games especially during crossfire setup. I went to event log and looked into the problem. I did the standard reseating the PCIe and swapping GPU. I found out that OEM for the GPU used two different brands of memory. One was faulty and other was stable. Needless to say, I returned the GPU and got the proper GPU with same VRAM manufacturer
Does each and every Error trigger a BSOD or can some be caught and handled (I'm talking about errors that were not able to be corrected as opposed to the warnings you got which were corrected errors)?
Thw windows event log is a good place to go if you wan't to feels depressed and stressed out for mostly no reason. Unless you actually know exactly what you're doing, or you're computer is acting up and you need something to google, dont go there.
It's like the equivalent of trying to self diagnose an illness, there's always something wrong, the thing is not everything is neccecairly dangerous.
This is probably the most usefully informative text guide I have ever watched. You just potentially made me be able to diagnose any problems that I've ever experienced with Windows. Thank you so much!!
This area of Windows is a favourite for scammers in call centres. They call up unsuspecting non-technical people, remote onto their PC and open up the error log.. Then say "look these are problems, viruses in your computer" ... "Just fifty dollars to fix it yes?"
even if you choose to ignore an error, it is always best to know why the error exists, sometimes the error is actually a lie (amazingly often the error is a lie), but knowing why is important in pc repair, your customer will not be happy if they have the same problem in three weeks.
Tek Syndicate Glad to see a plug on Win Event Viewer.
The logs are a great place to start troubleshooting :)
Thank you for this. It seems i had an unnecessary service trying to operate in the background, but was unable to do so because i had disabled other parts of Windows that it required. No more errors in my log :)
Great video Wendell, some people may find these boring but i really like them.
Thanks for taking the time to make this video. I enjoy watching these tutorials.
Watching this video, then BSOD'd for the first time in years. Coincidence?
Illuminati confirmed bro. Be careful
fatmike01 half life 3 has been confirmed too.
anonymous is on it.
Hahaha I remember trying to watch a 4k video on RUclips with a 5 year old computer and it bsod instantly.
Gerald Mah This is why Wendel never showed his face for years, his awesomeness makes PCs bow down everywhere.
Gerald Mah it's coincidence. bsod can happen anytime.
Tek Syndicate Great video! My favorite vids are the ones where I learn IT releated stuff especially about windows! I know about the event viewer but there were some things about it that I didnt know and now I do which helps me not only at home but at work as well!
Oh, and I also think its great that Windell doesnt try and hide his face anymore. IDK why but it just seems better for the video :)
GreywolfStudios74 Agreed. When someone seems to be hiding something, there is a feeling that you can't entirely trust them, whether it is justified or not. It always seemed to be one of their "things" that Wendell was hidden behind a bank of monitors, but it becomes tiresome. Is he hiding from the law? Was his face chewed up in a farming accident? Is it Mel Gibson in a new career?
I am relieved that they decided to end the subterfuge. It is a lot more practical for making different kinds of videos, and it is much more enjoyable to watch when the viewer isn't distracted with wondering why he is hidden.
There is a place for shooting the shit, so to speak, with a nice cold one, but Wendell's videos are much more focused on what I am interested in. Hopefully we will see an increase in output.
It's the year 2015 and people are still doing their first shit.
gdfschimpi007 Of course, there is a thing called new users.
mbsfaridi I don't think it's just the new users doing this.
Eric Lin Sure but they may not be used to writing "first" when they get the chance to be the first comment.
gdfschimpi007 0.o I read that as "It's 2015 and people are defecating for the first time" 0.o
***** Not sure what you're trying to get at. That has nothing to do with what I said.
Great video Wendel. I knew about event log and such, but never had a clue about windbg. Looking forward to your next vid.
i remember getting a error message once saying "error rebooting please reboot"
The man said the words "just windows being windows" -
the Level of things we put up with from windows - if it wasn't for games, we would have parted ways a while back
Thanks for this! I recently had to spend 3 weeks troubleshooting for blue screens on my rig, and spent a tonne of time on the event viewer, and taught myself a lot during that time, but its nice to have this as a favourite to go back to.
For any interested, to find the blue screen I ended up replacing everything (even the mobo) and still had BS. The culprit in the end? Turns out my i5 was faulty after only 10 months. The more you know.
Never had to use it but nice resource.
David Cooltions If you can't find why a program keeps crashing, the Application on Windows Logs helps a lot.
Cheers but I never encounter those problems mate.
David Cooltions a program has never crashed on you? Rrrright....
Only chrome.
What about flash?
Tek Syndicate Yes. Thanks for this Wendell. I usually find that Windows event logs lines are so cryptic that it takes far too long (longer than it should) with Google to decrypt all the numeric information which looks scary, and ultimately isn't at all. But well done for illustrating the process.
On mini-dumps, I've used debugging symbols to trace what was causing BSODs in *my* software. When the software is someone elses', I don't find that the Microsoft debugging tools tell me any more than I can get with the smaller, and IMHO easier Bluescreen View, from Nirsoft. I've introduced my team to it, and they seem to like it. Aside from anything else, it can show the Bluescreen, as XP would have done. They know what those looked like, and had some idea what the common errors where about, where the dump files are pretty alien to them. (or to anyone who hasn't done much software development on low-level Microsoft APIs)
So, I'd recommend that for anyone who is new to this, or wants a tool on a USB flash drive, rather than pulling the dumps off onto the flash drive, or SMB admin share to view at the tech office.
Will you make same video on linux event log please?
anymore linux videos coming up?
Andy Feng agreed we need more Linux video's
I think they're done. But you can expect one every 5 months it seems.
David Cooltions Don't think so at all they just need to amp up the amount of video releases I know editing and getting the content ect takes time but they do need to hurry up.
love these videos even though I'm not affected by any related issues I still enjoy watching and I might eventually need it.
You should do more videos like this, super helpful!
Awesome vid, much info in a short period.
It's where to look when you're running Windows servers. It's also pretty useful for coders, you can just dump your loggings there and have some kind of automation to look for your logs and perform monthly archive or something.
needed this 3 months ago lol ... great vid
This is cool to know. I did not know about the windows event log. I don't have these errors, which is nice. Thanks for this video!
Excellent information on the power of the windows event log. Great video.
Is there another easy to use windows tool to have cybersecurity threat analysis? Snort and Whazu are a little too technical right now.
Event viewer saved my ass today, warned me about possible hard drive failure, and then it happened. Took it out and threw it away!
Great video Wendell, keep it up!
I just told a buddy this morning that my life has been lacking some Tek Syndicate.
Thank you sir! Thank you for the encouragement to dig.
Installing Windbg is probably the hardest part of this
a video for my favorites list, definitely
This is incredibly useful, thank you for this information!
There's also, for the lazy, or phone support or whatever other reason you may find, whocrashed. It does most of the work for you...at least on a bsod, probably better only really when it's a software/driver problem. It helped me to find a webcam driver problem, and some other driver or software issue in the past(since I knew of the event viewer and dump files, bit not how to read them).
dude's smart as fuck
jimmy thed Thus why I call him. " Wendell The Wise". :D
Thank you, very informative and interesting !
Wendell is the kind of people who deserve much respect and lots of money... Huge ups to you sir ! I wish I had half the knowledge that you have !
Guys I really love videos like this, I miss those old maks hacks videos that lets you get to know your machine.. Cool stuff
Really great video!
This video shows some very useful information, thank you.
Great video, Wendel.
Nice descriptive video !
Great episode. Very informative. Could listen to Wendell talk all day.
This is really good information. Thank you
i looked at the windows event log and it showed only 2 warnings that show up after restart only once, Event ID 1014 and 219
Neat! I had no idea this existed. Thank you.
One thing lead me here, that Friends reference!
thank you Wendell. very informative :)
Thank you for taking us through the the terrifying abyss of the event viewer.
Great video! Now, exactly how heavily can this affect performance? YeALSO, when bluescreens hit, we are fixing the exact issues reported, correct?
Cause then i got some more annoying problems with my current MOBO i am running. The bastard make certain applications crash when i go in and out of them. GPU/PCI express related i can only imagine. But i am a noob at this tho.
Yellow thats probably windows itself not closing programs correctly, id look at any recent windows update, or if you dont mind it. a fresh install will probably fix that.
Paul Smith It was a general question made before anything bad has gone down yet.
Older gamers are well aware that re-installing Windows solve performance issues to some degree.
Cody Brown Read my previous comment.
Cody Brown Can, but is not.
I have done enough tests to know what and what is not causing certain issues.
Regardless, this is not exactly about a problem, but a "what if" case-scenario.
Going for a Friend's themed title?
Can't believe I haven't been watch the Tek. Time for a marathon :)
Wendell is a veritable fountain of knowledge.
Awesome tutorial thanx
Event viewer is in the the contextual menu when you right click the start menu...
If you're on 7 and you can't install the debugging tools, uninstall both C++ 2010 Redist packages, then install the debugging tools and then reinstall the current redistributables.
omg! you have so many warnings and errors, you better call the indian microsoft support to get your $100 anti-virus software.
That description sounds eerily similar to those phone scammers that use it too.
i'm sorry for the potty humor
but when you bluescreen
your computer takes a dump
a minidump of memory
Wendel do you intentionally keep your volume levels this low? I find your videos are much quieter compared to any others.
Thank you Wendell!!
Nice... very useful information :D Thank you!
Reinstalled Win7 a couple of months ago. It took 3 tries to get a proper installation with all updates without having Windows somehow crapping out somewhere in the process. Now that it's installed and working, since February my event log is FILLED with errors and warnings, I'm talking 697 Errors, 925 Warnings and 10 Criticals (BSOD's) from all kinds of sources. Yay Windows. Oh, and none of them are related to the ones discussed in this video btw.
Neumah Try linux
nickw1235 I'm planning on having a dual boot Win10/Linux setup on my next computer. Need WIn for games and Adobe suite. :/
Stefan Falls The event log is what I referenced in my initial post. I haven't really dug in to it to find a root cause (I get errors from all kinds of sources) because I think I'll just try to reinstall once again instead. I like messing around with computers, but I prefer spending my time on working with them, not trying to get them to work.
Thanks Wendell!
I read my logs sometimes and it told why had a BSOD awhile ago
The man with the glasses seems like he knows his shit.
It wasn't the same to reach that program through my copy of Win 7. A simple search of "computer management" brought me to it though easy enough. I couldn't find any errors or warnings for some odd crashes I've had though. It certainly made me aware of the ever present driver issue for my graphics tablet though... Wacom never addressed that, so sad.
Wow, good trick to learn, glad I'm not getting many errors on my AMD system, definitely like these new educational videos.
Thank you! I love to watch Wendell..
Just liked, soley for the phrase "Pissing off the badger" :D
I wonder if this would help me figure out why one of my users on my PC can not access any folders after reboot, even folders on their desktop
this is going to be really useful
i got a question lord tek !? where can i get that awesome wallpaper :)
I've been checking event viewer recently because I have a computer i put together ~2-3 months ago and it's been randomly freezing since start, although since it just freezes randomly (sometimes BSOD but more and more rare that it does that), it just says in event viewer that it unexpectedly crashed
I am getting ntcskral.exe though when it bsod (tried switching all but cpu and motherboard), mainly occurs now when I try Prime95 tests (blend, large FFT) and freeze on small fft
Hey, that is some very interesting stuff! Do more please :)
I also got WHEA errors but it was from undervolting my CPU messing with overclock settings
Tek Syndicate Is that a Friends reference? ;)
Been on windows since 95, never had a blue screen..... drivers/bios updates people!
***** That's bullshit and you know it... There have been Windows versions where BSOD were unavoidable, including the "oh so glorious Windows XP" in it's first year. XP SP0 was so unpredictable, and had so many compability issues, that even 98SE, and Me seemed to be the more stable options. Also, driver updates were many times the reason that lead to system issues. And BIOS updates for consumer hardware in the 90s and early 00s? Yeah, good luck...
But hey, maybe you hopped from Win95 straight to NT, didn't switch to XP until SP2 was out, and just recently made the switch to 7. Although, even then it's highly unlikely you've never had a BSOD.
***** I have only ever experienced two...
Tyler Wrage Which is far more believable than never having a single one in over 20 years.
***** could b true if he stuck with simple basic hardware, blue screen will happen on occasion with higher end stuff more often. I never experienced one on my e-machine from high school
ChrisD4335 There was a time when unplugging an USB printer (which I'd consider pretty basic hardware) at the wrong time could turn your OS into a wet fart. Keep in mind, we're talking about the past 20, not just 10 years.
Interesting video, thank you
So if you see an error in the event viewer, dont worry, it can be anything ... great
Great video
Get it? crash course? no? nobody? alright
Thanks for the informative video! I will need this to share with others to give them the proper headstart to diagnosing their own system software and hardware. Steam forum is littered with uneducated PC users and most are downright malice and impatient when they encounter an errors. They often blame developers for their poorly managed system and some do treat PC like it's a console waiting for the patch expecting it will resolve their simple issue. I myself had issue as well with my video card before. The game would often restart or hang when executing DX11 games especially during crossfire setup. I went to event log and looked into the problem. I did the standard reseating the PCIe and swapping GPU. I found out that OEM for the GPU used two different brands of memory. One was faulty and other was stable. Needless to say, I returned the GPU and got the proper GPU with same VRAM manufacturer
hmm the buttload of errors I see in mine upsets me though the last one was from an hour ago
is this on windows 7? unable to find it by way of means you show
Time to jump on X99 my minecraft skills will thank me
Does each and every Error trigger a BSOD or can some be caught and handled (I'm talking about errors that were not able to be corrected as opposed to the warnings you got which were corrected errors)?
Thank you Wendell! :)
cool man great video thanks
I have no alerts in event viewer naming a WHEA problem. X99-A and 5820K.
Cant for the life of me find the dump folder place ect tried alooooot of things just doesnt create one
can you do this with hhd to know a good program and what to see?
Thanks Tek syndicate u fixed my pc i had alot of errors i have googled it and i repair most of the errors
Ignorance is bliss. I wish I didn't know this.
Captain Corona It's better to know what could go wrong than have something go wrong and have no idea why.
this is awesome
Thanks for this info Wendell :O)
i always went to administrative events and use who crashed for dump files
doesnt ccleaner/alt/ do this shit for you?
if disable does it make computer better?