I stopped guessing why my PC crashes after I started using this built-in Windows tool

Reliability Monitor logs every crash and failed update your PC goes through, then lays it all out on a timeline so you can stop guessing.

I stopped guessing why my PC crashes after I started using this built-in Windows tool
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I'd used Event Viewer in Windows plenty of times before, but parsing cryptic error codes to figure out why my PC crashed felt like the wrong approach for something that should have been straightforward. Reliability Monitor takes a different angle by giving you a scored timeline of your system's health, so you can trace a crash back to the exact day something changed. I've known about it for a while, but I started using it after spending one too many sessions in Event Viewer. It won't repair your system, but it makes figuring out what broke far less painful.

Reliability Monitor has been in Windows for years, and it's woefully underused

Microsoft has included Reliability Monitor in every version of Windows since Vista. That's nearly two decades of availability, and yet I'd bet most people have never opened it. Microsoft doesn't surface it in an obvious place, which it should because it's genuinely one of the most readable diagnostic tools in the entire OS.

What it does is simple. It tracks system events, app crashes, hardware failures, Windows Update issues, driver installations, and plots them on a day-by-day timeline with a stability index scored from 1 to 10. Unfortunately, Microsoft pushes you toward Event Viewer for troubleshooting, which is powerful but overwhelming if you're not a sysadmin. Reliability Monitor presents much of the same information in a format that actually makes sense at a glance.

To open it, press the Start key, type "reliability," and click "View reliability history." That's it. You can also get there through Control Panel-go to System and Security, then Security and Maintenance, expand the Maintenance section, and click "View reliability history." It might take a few seconds to load the first time since Windows needs to compile your event data, but after that, it opens quickly.

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Once it's open, you'll see the stability chart immediately, and that's where things get useful.

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Here's what the stability chart tells you

The chart runs along a timeline - days by default, though you can switch to a weekly view at the top. The Y-axis shows your stability index from 1 to 10, and every critical failure pulls that score down. A flat line at 10 means your system's been clean. A sudden dip means something went wrong, and you can see exactly when.

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Below the chart, there are rows of icons. Red X icons mark critical events such as crashes, blue screens, and hard freezes. Yellow triangles are warnings, like a disk running into errors. Blue "i" icons represent informational events such as driver installs, app updates, and Windows patches. These aren't problems on their own, but they're useful context when something does break.

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Click on any specific day, and the bottom pane shows every event from that date. You'll see the application name, a description of what happened, the fault module, and a timestamp. It's detailed enough to be useful without burying you in hex codes the way Event Viewer does.

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The toggle between daily and weekly views is worth mentioning. Daily is better for pinpointing a specific event, while weekly gives you a broader sense of whether your system's been stable over time or slowly falling apart.

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I use it to pinpoint what actually broke

Whenever my PC starts acting up, I open Reliability Monitor and look for the day the stability score dropped. That dip is my starting point.

I click on that day and check the informational events first. If a GPU driver was installed the day before and three application crashes followed, that's not a coincidence. The same goes for Windows Updates-I've had cumulative updates quietly break things more than once, and Reliability Monitor made the connection obvious.

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The important thing here is pattern recognition. If the same app name keeps appearing in the critical events row across multiple days, that's the problem. You're not guessing anymore.

Next time your PC starts misbehaving, check Reliability Monitor before you uninstall apps at random or roll back updates. Once you identify the likely cause, you can dig deeper-use Device Manager to roll back a driver, check Windows Update history for a bad patch, or uninstall/update the app that keeps showing up in the crash logs. It's a better starting point than a Google search of a vague error message.

Guides Editor

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Yasir covers Windows, hardware, and privacy. A Windows user since XP and a Mechanical Engineer by training, he likes digging into the technical details most people skip over. His work has also been published on MakeUseOf, spanning everything from Windows optimizations to Excel deep dives. Outside of writing, he tinkers with his custom-built Ryzen rig, watches Impractical Jokers, and listens to way too much Lo-Fi.

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