Event Viewer: knowing your errors

When a PC crashes, freezes or blue-screens, Windows quietly records what happened. That record lives in Event Viewer — a built-in tool most people never open. Used well, it can turn "my computer just crashed" into an actual diagnosis.

Opening Event Viewer

Press the Windows key, type "Event Viewer" and open it. The section you want most of the time is Windows Logs, which contains System and Application logs.

Understanding the levels

• Information — normal activity, usually safe to ignore
• Warning — something wasn't right but Windows carried on
• Error — a component or app failed
• Critical — a serious failure, often what caused a crash or restart

Focus on Error and Critical entries around the time your problem happened. The date and time columns let you line events up with when the PC actually misbehaved.

What to look for

Double-click an entry to see the source and an event ID. Common culprits include disk errors (a failing drive), Kernel-Power (an unexpected shutdown, often power or overheating), and application crashes tied to a specific program. You don't need to memorise IDs — the source and description usually point you in the right direction.

Event Viewer rarely gives a single obvious answer, but a cluster of disk errors before every crash tells its own story.

Where it gets tricky

Event Viewer shows symptoms, not always causes — and it's easy to chase harmless warnings down a rabbit hole. If you're seeing repeated disk or Kernel-Power errors, or crashes that keep coming back, that's worth a proper look. We diagnose recurring crashes and blue screens across London, on-site the same day, and read the logs so you don't have to.