The most obvious first step on the road to resolving performance issues is the aptly named Troubleshooting section in the classic Control Panel. If your mystery involves inexplicably slow performance or crashes, you have several places to look for clues. Getting to know your troubleshooting toolkitĪs any detective will tell you, solving a mystery requires evidence. For information about creating regular backups and image backups as well as information about system restore points, see Chapter 16, “Backup, restore, and recovery.”.

Those tools are the subject of this chapter. But it also entails learning to use the many tools that Windows provides for diagnosing errors and recovering from problems. That starts with making regular backups, of course, along with system restore points. So the prudent course is to prepare for the unexpected. But you don’t live there, and neither do we. In a fully debugged, perfect world, such occurrences would never darken your computer screen. And on rare occasions, the grim BSOD (“blue screen of death,” more formally known as a Stop error or bugcheck) arrives, bringing your whole system to a halt. Once in a while, a feature of Windows walks off the job without warning. Apps hang (stop responding) or crash (shut down unexpectedly). That might not be exactly how the famous quote goes, but it’s certainly true whenever hardware and software are involved.Īlthough Windows has generally become more stable and reliable over time, it will never be perfect. Troubleshooting with alternative boot optionsĪs they say, stuff happens.Getting to know your troubleshooting toolkit.

Performance troubleshooter windows 10