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Using the Reliability Monitor as a Lie Detector

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There are some days that we feel like parents. Our kids come back with something expensive that we gave them and it is broke. They have no idea what happened to it. All they know is that they want you to either fix it or get them a new one. Being the superior support personnel we all are, we ask our usual round of questions only to get vague answers in return. What if I could tell you that you could eliminate the “What did you install/uninstall” question? How about even getting rid of the “Did anything crash” question? With the Reliability Monitor, you can.

Your start the reliability monitor by opening it as an MMC Snap-in. You can also click Start and type rel. At the top of the search results, right mouse click Reliability and Performance Monitor and select Run as Administrator. If you right mouse click Reliability and Performance, you can connect to that other user’s computer. Using the Reliability monitor, you can see when things went south on that client. You can see what crashed, what was removed and what was installed.




In this image of the System Stability chart, you can click on each day to see what went on. We had a pseudo way of doing this in XP with the System Restore Points. What you click through the System Restore calendar you got a little detail about what was changed that caused the restore point to be created. My personal record for dealing with a user who was not truthful is 2.5 days. Once I uncovered the truth, the problem was resolved in 20 minutes. Image the time, money and frustrations that we could have saved with this tool.
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