Quick question: How do I use Event Viewer?

[Ken90630]

Hi, All,

I see some of you guys mention Event Viewer from time to time and I'd like to check it out. Prob is I can't find it.

I'm using Windows 2000 Pro right now. I tried Start/Programs/Accessories and also clicked around a bit but couldn't find it. Can anyone tell me how I can launch this program?

 

[lansalot]

Start, Run, eventvwr

or

It's in control panel under Administrative Tools also.

 

[Ken90630]

Thanks, lansalot. I appreciate it.

 

[montag451]

Did you find anything interestin?

 

[Ken90630]

Originally posted by: montag451
Did you find anything interestin?

Well, I wasn't going to burden you guys with this, but since you asked.

Not sure. There have been 2,352 "events" since January 5 of this year (that's as far back as the viewer goes, apparently). I don't know whether that's good, average or bad, but my superficial guess would be that it's not good.

Trouble is I don't really know what I'm looking at. The majority of the events say, "Error," with a white X in a red circle, and the source is Service Control Manager. I don't know what this means.

There are another zillion or so events that say, "Warning," with a black exclamation mark inside a yellow triangle, and the source for those is savrt, whatever that is. Most of the rest of the events say "Information" and the source is Tcpip or Browser. They look less worrisome (to my admittedly unsophisticated eye).

Only reason I wanted to check this out was my dinosaur computer here has been freezing up fairly often for no apparent reason. I'll be sitting here and everything just locks up. I go to Task Manager and the CPU usage is at 100%. It just stays there for 2 or 3 minutes, then mysteriously frees itself up and everything's back to 'normal' until it does it again. Which sometimes doesn't take long. Grrrrrrr. :|

I'm pretty good about keeping up to date with my a-v, firewall and Microsoft patches & defs, although the only anti-spyware program I'm currently running is Spybot S&D and I know it misses a fair amount of spyware that's out there. (SpySweeper is on deck for my new rig.) So I could have an undetected piece of spyware. But it could also be a hardware issue. This is a 7-year-old Gateway sloth with a Celeron 333 [stop laughing :laugh:] and I'm very close to replacing it anyway, but I thought I'd check Event Viewer just for the heck of it to see if anything obvious jumped out at me. It could be a number or things -- dying RAM, dying PSU or mobo, who knows ....

I have a new computer about 99% put together, so this one is headed for storage soon anyway. So no biggie. But it would be nice to know what has been causing this annoying prob. :frown:

 

[montag451]

OK, with the most common 'x', post the SOURCE, EVENT ID, and the text description that goes with it.
FOR each most common error.
Also, are you getting any crashes or non-functionality?
Why did you suddenly want to see what was in the event logs?
What tickled your fancy?

 

[lansalot]

www.eventid.net

 

[Ken90630]

Originally posted by: montag451
OK, with the most common 'x', post the SOURCE, EVENT ID, and the text description that goes with it.
FOR each most common error.

Hi, Montag,

For the events that say, "Error," the event number is 7011, the source is Service Control Manager and the text says, "Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the Dnscache service." :Q

The second most common event is the one that says, "Information," the event number is 8033, the source is Browser, and the text says, "The browser has forced an election on network \Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{1R479715-2064E-3JKQ-9F39-4F648B85217R} because a master browser was stopped." (I edited the numbers & letters in that string because I don't know exactly what it means and I don't wanna be identifying my computer's location on the Web here for all to see, if indeed that string would do that. Paranoid? Probably, but better safe than sorry since I don't know.)

These two events comprise 75% or more of the events logged. The rest look pretty innocuous.

Also, are you getting any crashes or non-functionality?

Why did you suddenly want to see what was in the event logs?

See my previous post (the one right before yours). Middle paragraphs.

BTW, thanks again lansalot. Gonna check that out right now.

EDIT: Just checked out eventid.net and that 7011 event ("dnschache," etc.) could be a number of different things, including "insufficient resources" and/or a modified hosts file caused by Spybot S&D. Well, I have a paltry 192 MB of RAM on this old Gateway, so it wouldn't surprise me if I exceed available RAM from time to time (although everytime I've ever checked it with Task Manager, it's always using about 1/2 or 2/3 of capacity). I do have Spybot, so that could be a cause too.

Whatever ... I'm not gonna spend much more time on this, as I have a new machine on deck and this old warhorse box is headed for storage anyway. Just thought I'd do a quick check to see if an easy fix was possible. No worries.