Generate a System Health Report in Windows Vista

Brandon LeBlanc — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 08:45:00 GMT

In Windows Vista, users can have an extensive System Health Report generated for them in helping troubleshoot performance and reliability issues on their PC or to see how healthy their PC is in general. For the average user, this probably won't mean anything. But for me, I'm the type of user that really likes having the ability to create reports that tell me about my PC so I was really excited to find this ability in Windows Vista.

This evening I decided to generate a report on my main desktop PC for the first time and see what it says. To have a System Health Report generated:

Open Start Menu.
Right-click on "Computer" and click "Properties".
In the System Properties window, click on your Windows Experience Index rating.
In the Performance Information and Tools window, under "Tasks" in the left-hand options pane click "Advanced Tools".
Under Advanced Tools window choose "Generate a system health report" at the bottom.

The report generates after about 60 seconds of testing. Here is my System Health Report I generated this evening:

As you can see, any sort of errors or warnings for your system are displayed first at the top of the report. You can see from my report, my HP Photosmart C5100 Printer is disabled giving an error. This is because I recently switched my HP Photosmart C5100 from being connected to my PC via USB to being a network printer. I can ignore this error. Under warnings, my CPU was being consumed more than 50% by the EncoderUI.exe process. This is Microsoft Expression Encoder. I was encoding a HD video using Microsoft Expression Encoder at the time of running the System Health Check Report. Nothing to worry about there. Once the encoding was finished, I re-ran the report and my CPU usage dropped to an acceptable level.

In generating the System Health Report, a series of basic system and performance checks are completed. You can also check out your Software and Hardware configurations as well. The information in these tests is pretty detailed. Under Network and TCP you can see outbound and inbound IP traffic for example from when the report was generated or the exact amount of memory being used by processes.

You have the option to save your report as an HTML document if you would like. For me, if I need to save a report, I just print to an XPS document.

For folks using the latest version of Windows Live OneCare, you also have the ability to pull up monthly reports displaying information on PC scans, your monthly subscription, and firewall protection. By default, after a monthly tune-up is run your monthly report is displayed.

Giving the Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) a Try

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:02:00 GMT

Today, Nick told you about some updates to the tools in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) from Barcelona, Spain at TechEd IT Forum. I recently had a chance to give one of the components of MDOP - the Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) 6.0 - a try. DaRT is an excellent set of tools for IT Professionals to troubleshoot unresponsive PCs and removing viruses and malware off infected PCs in their environment. DaRT 6.0 also now has the ability for IT Professionals to conduct offline removal of malware and viruses from infected PCs.

The first thing I noticed when I started using DaRT is that it provides two options to the IT Professional: a way to analyze crash files from unresponsive PCs through the Crash Analysis Wizard, and a way to create a startup disc with the necessary tools in fixing an unresponsive PC that is unable to boot into Windows called ERD Commander.

I first took a look at the Crash Analysis Wizard.

The Crash Analysis Wizard allows an IT Professional to take a crash dump file (*.dmp files associated with a system crash) and analyze it and get important bits of information that could help figure out why a PC is crashing. I have an old .dmp file from a crash a long time ago I dug up to run through the Crash Analysis Wizard. The Crash Analysis Wizard requires the Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows as a prerequisite so before proceeding in analyzing my .dmp file, I had to install that first. I was also able to specify any Symbol files I had as well. I had no Symbols to provide so I skipped to choosing the specific .dmp file I wanted to analyze.

Once I choose the .dmp files - I clicked next and the analysis commenced. The analysis finished in about a minute and brought up a new screen telling me what probably was the cause of the crash as well as when the crash originally occurred.

If I wanted, I could view the full details of the crash as well. The .dmp file I used for this was from June 20^th and was in fact due to a graphics driver issue. The graphics driver issue was corrected after updating to the latest video driver.

I then proceeded to check out ERD Commander.

ERD Commander lets you create a startup image. That startup image can then be burned to a CD in which you can boot off of that lets you repair PCs that do not function. I went through the process, via the ERD Commander Wizard, in creating my own startup disc. In creating a startup disc, I was required to provide a Windows Vista DVD to create the boot image.

After choosing the Windows Vista Ultimate DVD in my DVD Drive and choose next, the Wizard then told me it is about to extract the necessary files in creating a boot image and that it may take a few minutes. For me, it barely took a minute to extra the files. Once the extraction of the files is complete, the wizard then brought me to a new screen in which it gives me an offering of tools I can add to the startup disc.

I went ahead and choose all of the tools. You are given the choice of the following tools for your startup disc:

Computer Management
Crash Analyzer
Disk Commander
Disk Wipe
Explorer
File Restore
Hotfix Uninstall
Locksmith
Registry Editor
Solution Wizard
Standalone System Sweeper
System File Repair
TCP/IP Configuration

In choosing all of the tools - I proceeded to the next step: providing any .inf files for any specific devices I would need to install drivers for (*.inf files are device driver files). At this point I didn't have any specific drivers I wanted to include on my startup disc as I was looking to create a generic disc. I was then asked to include any additional files, which I had none, and then create the disc. ERD Commander creates the startup disc image as an .iso file.

To my surprise, after the .iso image is done being created - ERD Commander asked me if I would like to then burn that .iso image to a CD. ERD Commander allows you to burn the disc directly. I was thinking I would have to use a third-party imaging burning tool to burn my startup disc image. This was a very cool surprise perk (a feature I think IT Pros will appreciate as well).

At the end of the Wizard, my startup disc was created as well as an .iso of the disc so I can re-burn the disc and create more if needed at a later date.

To test my new startup disc, I fired up Windows Vista in Virtual PC 2007 and booted off my new startup disc. When I did this, it went into System Recovery (WinRE) which is built into Windows Vista and DaRT runs on top of WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment). Matter a fact, WinRE has its own tools as well and DaRT works with them in helping the IT Pro diagnose what is wrong and recover a unresponsive PC.

I was then able to choose the tools offered in DaRT (which were the tools I chose above) and was able to scan the PC for malware and much more.

After experiencing DaRT first hand, I believe it is a must have for IT Professionals and offers a great set of tools in helping IT Professionals recovery crashed PCs in their environment. DaRT 6.0 (announced today as part of MDOP) offers IT Professionals the ability to run these tools on a BitLocker-encrypted drive as well. Customers can learn more about DaRT on Microsoft.com.

Windows Experience Blog : Troubleshooting

Generate a System Health Report in Windows Vista

Giving the Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) a Try