Reliability Monitor is Windows’ most underused crash-diagnosis tool — a visual timeline of every application crash, driver failure, and Windows error, correlated by date, that most users never open.
Start-Process "perfmon.exe" "/rel"
Reading It
Each day is a column, with icons for critical events (red X), warnings (yellow triangle), and informational events — clicking any icon shows full technical details, including the exact faulting module, useful for identifying whether a crash is caused by the application itself or a specific DLL it depends on.
Correlating Crashes with Changes
Reliability Monitor’s real value is the timeline view — if crashes started on a specific date, checking what else happened that day (a Windows Update, a driver update, a new software install) frequently reveals the actual cause far faster than troubleshooting the crashing application in isolation.
# Application crash events specifically, via Event Viewer's Application log
Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{LogName='Application'; Id=1000} -MaxEvents 10 |
Select-Object TimeCreated, Message