A great troubleshooting and information tool in Windows Vista is the Event Viewer. Vista’s new user interface allows for easier filtering and ability to sort events. The end user has ultimate control of the type of events that are logged. Vista’s event viewer allows basic diagnostics within the application.
With Microsoft’s commitment to quality, events now impose a stricter set of standards that make troubleshooting easier. Log files are stored as text files so they can be referred to when troubleshooting.
The customization of the event viewer allows the end user to create and save custom views so that they can easily
find the problem when troubleshooting events. The power of this customization allows administrators to collect information about other computers on a network. This allows the correlation of problems that may affect computers in the network.
In the right pane of the event viewer is the actions pane. This pane contains a list of commands and actions that are associated with the event viewer. Relevant tasks are associated with each individual event.
Again, to focus on a specific series of events, a custom view can be created to allow a detailed information list in form style that can be saved and reused at a later time.
With Windows XP, there were specific drawbacks such as the number of items in a log. Saving and storing these logs was perhaps the biggest drawback. Many of the events in this operating system were not well-documented and required research to find what the events meant. With Windows XP, sorting through logs to find specific reasons during troubleshooting became a huge task.
Windows Vista’s event viewer is more streamlined and easier to use. End users will find it far less intimidating than Microsoft’s older operating systems.
Another drawback in the system stems from the fact that Windows XP has other logs that are stored as text files on the hard disk. This means that when troubleshooting problems, you may have to scan through a bunch of text files in addition to scanning through Event Viewer.