How to monitor the health of your PC
Published: June 20, 2005
When your computer runs at its optimum level, you can be more productive. When it doesn't, you can be faced with lost or corrupted data, and have to spend big chunks of time troubleshooting annoying problems.
As someone who works mainly with the server end of things, I'm familiar with advanced tools for determining whether computer systems are healthy or not. Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) are two top-notch products I often use. There are numerous third-party tools as well, several of which I've reviewed previously in Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine.
But I'm often asked by home users and home office workers whether there are similar tools available for monitoring the health of their own systems. In this article, I'll explain how to check your computer system using the following:
| • | Personal observation |
| • | Windows XP Help and Support Center |
| • | Local area connection status |
| • | WMI scripts |
| • | Third-party tools |
Start with obvious symptoms
Diagnosis starts first with the symptoms you observe. Only from there do you move on to more complex investigation. Let your senses be your first guide whether things are OK or something is wrong. Does your hard drive sound different than usual? Do applications seem to take longer to open than before? Do you smell something like burning rubber? Do you get a lot of dust on your fingers when you touch your PC's case? Does the Internet seem slower than usual when you download files to your computer? Does the fan make a grinding sound when you start your computer in the morning? Is Windows Error Reporting popping up more frequently than usual? Simple things like this can indicate your computer is not as healthy as it should be. They might be indications that it could possibly be about to fail or cause data loss. If you notice any of these symptoms, you should initiate a more systematic check of your PC's health, which I'll describe next.
Use Windows XP Help and Support
If you're running Windows XP, there's a simple system health monitoring tool available right at your fingertips. The tool can be found in the Help and Support Center.
To monitor system health using Help and Support
1. | Log on as a local administrator on your computer, click Start, and then click Help and Support. |
2. | Under the Pick a task, click Use Tools to view your computer information and diagnose problems. |
3. | In the Task pane, click My Computer Information, and then click View the status of my system hardware and software. |
Results of using Help and Support to view system status on the author's computer.
The figure above shows that my system appears to be in excellent health with more than enough RAM, lots of free disk space, supported drivers for key hardware components, and no older devices to drag performance down or cause instability.
If you're not logged on as a local administrator, you can still perform the above procedure by starting Help and Support from the command-line using the Runas command:
1. | Open a command prompt window and type runas /user:administrator %windir%\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\helpctr.exe. |
2. | Enter your administrator password when prompted and continue as above. |
Now this kind of checkup may seem trivial but it's actually quite useful. I've read lots of posts in the Windows XP General newsgroup that say their computer has run out of room on the C drive. If you run this test from Help and Support regularly, you'll notice your C drive filling up long before the situation becomes critical.
Check your network's health
What about the status of your network? If your computer is on a local area network (LAN) at home, you can check your network connection a couple of ways. For example, I like to keep my local area connection icon visible in the notification area all the time, so I can right-click it and click Status to view my connection's health.
Status of the local area connection.
In the figure above, I can see that my connection has been active for just over 44 hours. Yesterday morning I restarted my system after installing some software on it. The status of my connection also shows up as Connected and the speed of my connection is 10 Mbps because my computer is connected to a 10BaseT hub.
Network Diagnostics is another built-in network health check you can run. It's also available from Help and Support.
1. | Under Pick a task, click Use Tools to view your computer information and diagnose problems. |
2. | In the Task pane, click Network Diagnostics. |
3. | Click Set scanning options, and select the network tests you want to perform. (I usually select everything.) Then click Save Options. Click Scan your system. |
Wait for the tests to complete, and then view the results. You can save them for later examination if you want.
The report generated by this tool gives you a lot of information to wade through. For networking issues the useful stuff is found under the heading Modems and Network Adapters. Anything that says PASSED in green letters is a good sign while anything with FAILED in red letters can indicate a problem. This simple test can quickly tell you whether your default gateway is working, your ISP's DNS servers are up, and whether your network adapter is functioning properly.
How to use WMI scripts
Let's say you've run these tests on your computer and no obvious explanation for the symptoms you noticed has come up. If you're a Windows XP expert, you'd probably like to go deeper in checking your PC. This is where Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), a powerful feature of Windows that lets you monitor system resources using different interfaces including COM, scripts, and the command-line. WMI queries the operating system for information about the hardware and it reports back on the hardware.
The way to use WMI is to write scripts that query the WMI database on your computer. Explaining how to do this from scratch is beyond the scope of this article and it's not something that many readers would be comfortable with. But, if you've got advanced computer skills, you can download handy scripts from the Script Center Script Repository on Microsoft TechNet. Some of these scripts can give you useful information about the health of your PC.
If you want to check how much free disk space you have, you can use the script List Available Disk Space. Copy this script into Notepad and saving it with the file extension *.vbs. Then you can either double-click the script to view a series of dialog boxes showing the name of each drive followed by its free space in bytes, or you can use cscript.exe, the command-line version of the Windows Script Host (WSH) script interpreter, as follows:
C:\>cscript c:\scripts\freespace.vbs
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.
DeviceID: C:
Free Disk Space: 63286108160
There are lots of other scripts you can find here that can be used for basic system health checking. For example, I could use a script to check the status of my local area connection. There's a script in the Repository called Verify System Uptime that can tell you this just by double-clicking it, as shown in the figure below.
Number of hours since my last reboot.
Note that it says 45 hours (not 44 as previously) because it's taken some time for me to finish this article.
I won't spoil your fun by pinpointing which scripts you'll want to run—just browse the Repository and explore on your own. And if you get stuck anywhere or want to customize a script in some way, post your question to Microsoft Windows Server Discussions in Scripting newsgroup and someone will be happy to offer you some suggestions.
Here's one more script: Retrieving Computer Fan Information. This sounds intriguing—will it tell us whether our chip fan is working properly?
C:\>cscript c:\scripts\fan.vbs
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.
Active Cooling: True
Availability: 3
Device ID: root\cimv2 0
Name: Cooling Device
Status Information: 2
Pretty cryptic, right? To understand these results you need dig into the Win32_Fan WMI class on MSDN, but right away you can see the incredible power of WMI to capture useful information about your PC's hardware. What about the current temperature of your hard drive? You probably know that if your hard drive gets too hot it can fail catastrophically. Unfortunately reading hard drive temperature is not currently possible using WMI, even though the basic framework for doing this is already defined, but as the Desktop Management Task Force continues to evolve the System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) specification, this kind of measurement may soon be supported on new hardware using WMI. On the other hand, if your brand of hard drive supports S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology), then you can monitor the health of your hard drives using third-party software and help anticipate drive failures before they happen.
Try third-party tools
The system monitoring tools included with Windows XP will probably meet most of your needs. But I find that they have two limitations. First, they can't monitor certain low-level hardware functions like processor temperature or whether the chip fan is functioning properly. Monitoring such features can help you anticipate some hardware failures before they happen. And second, Windows XP system monitoring features aren't tightly integrated with each other. So if you want a fully integrated health monitoring and reporting tool, you may want to look at what third-party vendors provide in this area.
Check out what other vendors offer in this area. For example, if your motherboard is from Intel, you can install the Intel Active Monitor and view your processor temperature, fan speed, and other useful information in real time. If you have a different motherboard, you may be able to find a similar utility for it. Or it may have been included on a CD when you bought your system. And there may already be a similar tool installed if you purchased an OEM system.
Finally, if you're looking for a more comprehensive third-party system health monitoring tool, see the Checking PC health thread in the Windows XP general newsgroup and check out the tools recommended by others or recommend one yourself, if you've found one that other Windows XP users could benefit from knowing about.
