What's crashing on my vista machine?

Reliability Monitor will show you what is crashing on your machine, but how do we find the status of those crashes or capture the data ourselves to analyze?

WERCON:

Go to start:run and type WERCON, this will bring you into the world of crash analysis.  All the crashes that happen on your system can be shipped off to Microsoft for analysis, and then we'll kindly respond on what action needs to be taken to resolve said issue.  If you're like me and like to poke around yourself you can take a look at the dumps captured as well.

It is possible to adjust WERCON to capture a dump when the application fails by updating ForceQueue:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\ForceQueue to 1

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\Consent\DefaultConsent to 1

Dumps can be found here:

For errors in processes running in system context or elevated processes: %ALLUSERSPROFILE %\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue

For other errors: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue

Did you also know that when you open MSINFO32 in Vista the Windows Error Reporting information is listed there as well?  I've been finding a lot of the information I'm looking for from customer in the MSINFO32.nfo file I request from them recently.

Below you can see that when I check for new solutions, if there is a resolution it lists that, at which point I can click on the appropriate link to find the remedy.

 

 

Technorati tags: Vista, Debugging, crash