Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
Don't be fooled by errors in Event Viewer or by those who try to get you to pay for a cure! It doesn't mean your computer is dying.
Hi, Leo. I have so many warnings or errors in Event Viewer. What can I do for removing them from my computer?
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In this excerpt from Answercast #27, I look at the Event Viewer, why it is often full of errors, and what you need to do about it.
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Event Viewer
Event Viewer is a mess. I'll just say that straight out.
- The best thing you can do when it comes to Event Viewer is ignore it completely.
All the errors... all the warnings... to you and to me, they are just noise. They really don't tell you anything useful and the fact that there are lots of them is actually normal.
Event Viewer shows warnings
That's what's frustrating about Event Viewer.
- On a machine that's working well, the Event Viewer will still be full of errors and warnings.
The best thing I can suggest for the average computer user is to completely ignore what's in the Event Viewer.
Avoid Event Viewer scams
This comes up as a topic from time to time; specifically because there are scammers out there who are taking advantage of people's fear with all this noise in Event Viewer.
They will give you a call and say, "Your computer is causing trouble on the internet. Just have a look at the Event Viewer and see how much stuff is in there that's causing trouble? That's a problem."
No, it's not. Those are people trying to scam you out of money, or trying to hack into your machine.
Hang up on them. It's that simple.
Diagnostic tool
Like I said, the Event Viewer is a mess. It's useful for people who are specifically diagnosing problems.
It can provide additional information for those folks. But you really have to know what to look for, how to weed out the information from the noise. Even then – only when you're looking for a problem.
I'll just say it again: on a perfectly well operating machine, the Event
Viewer will have lots of errors and warnings in it. It's unfortunate. It's
misleading. But do not read anything more into it than the fact that the Event
Viewer and the event log is simply a mess.
Next from Answercast #27 – How much sensitive information is stored on my computer when I purchase online?
Article C5485 - June 18, 2012 « »
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
June 18, 2012 7:45 PM
We regularly receive calls from foreign-sounding people claiming to be from Microsoft, who lead us through the Event Viewer, and try to extract money to "fix" the problem. We lead them on a merry dance for 10 minutes, before advising we run Linux. They just hang up.
June 24, 2012 6:54 AM
I like Event Viewer.
Event Viewer tells me that some MSI service could not be started. It's too much work to figure out which service, and why.
Event Viewer occasionally tells me that there was a disk error during paging on disk 2. Maybe there is a record somewhere in my machine that stores which disk block failed. Then again, maybe not. What can I expect from an OS that costs only $150?