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System Tools, a very useful section of the Computer Management Console. |
The Event Viewer
in the System Tools console is a list of
four logs Application, Internet Explorer, Security, and System. Now some of the
information in the logs is quite cryptic, you may have to go to Microsoft or the
application publisher to find out what an error code means.
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The Application log is where you would
find information, warnings, and errors generated by your applications. Have an
application that is having problems, look here for the cause. When you have an
application problem the publisher's tech support may ask for you to save this
log and email it to them. They will then have a better idea of why an
application is having problems. This log is set to over write itself every seven
days and with a default size of 512 kb (kilobytes) this is fairly small and if
you are experiencing problems with an application you may want to increase the
size
The Internet Explorer log is for IE
information, warnings, and errors generated by Internet Explorer. On the systems
I have seen there is rarely any information in this log.
The Security log is for security and audit
related information, warnings,
and errors. When your computer is setup this log
will stay mostly empty until the computer joins a domain at that time the domain
controller will set the parameters for Audit of logon/logoff and other services.
The System log is for system and hardware
information, warnings, and errors generated by the operating system, hardware
drivers, or even the hardware. This log has the most information, it logs a lot
of information that your computer generates when it is active, from services to
hardware. These logs are very informative when you are having a problem with a
service, device, or application. All information, warnings, and errors are
logged here if the service or driver installation program requests it be logged.
Note: not all installation programs ask for logging to the system event log.
The next item in the System Tools index is the Shared Folders,
here are all the shares for your computer. You can use this tool to share a
folder [not a file!] or to stop the sharing of a folder. You can also set
permissions for a folder from this tool. Very handy.
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Next in the
index in the System Tools console is the Local Users and Groups, here
you can create or delete local users, ad and remove users from the local groups.
This tool allows you to
create additional users, assign them to groups, set
passwords, and assign permissions to other resources on your computer. You [with
the appropriate permissions] can also delete user id's, be very careful of what
you change here, it can be catastrophic! One thing I will mention: the user id
Guest, it is also a member of the Local Group Guests, as a security precaution I
always remove Guest from the Guest group, change the password and disable the
account if it has not been disabled already.
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One of the most useless items in the System Tools is the Performance
Logs and Alerts. I say useless because you are not supplied the tools
nor the training required to use the Performance logs or how to setup the
Alerts. Even experienced MCSE's have trouble using and interpreting these logs.
Because this program is part of the Operating System you can not delete it from
the console. You can how ever disable the service, not a good idea, disabling
the service will cause a lot of errors in the system log.
Last of the System Tools is the Device Manager, this is a
very useful tool, you can gain a lot of information from the listing that is
other wise hard to find. You can see at a glance a device that is not working
and get a rudimentary description of the problem, like most Microsoft errors you
have to decode the error to find out what the underlying problem really is. This
is the second place I look when I am trouble shooting a problem, the first is
the Event Viewer.
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This tool will save you a lot of time, it will also make you stand back, look
at the computer in a quizzical way and scratch your head. When you right click
on a device in the right hand window you get a menu, go to properties of the
device and it will tell you why it is not working, well in a way.
The codes are semi-self explanatory. If you have a code of say 10, device
failed to start. Ok you already know the device failed to start but what does
code 10 mean? It means it does not have power [from Microsoft's web site] but
that does not tell you why it does not have power. You can from this tool:
uninstall the device, up or down grade the driver, or disable the device. You
can also look at such things as the interrupt [which is meaningless in the PCI
world today] you can see the memory range the device uses, this is useful if you
have documentation that tells you where the device should reside in memory.
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Also you can use the
System Tools for some power management tasks, lets say you
installed a network card and after a certain amount of time it powers off, but
you can not find the power settings from the control panel/power settings or
from the network properties of the network card [netgear cards come to mind
with this issue] the power setting is in the in the properties from the device
manager.
And one last thing, as with most [using this term loosely] Microsoft
products putting the mouse pointer in some white space, and pressing F1 will
bring up "Help".
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Where do you look for information on a
system error? In the Event Viewer!
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