If you've ever had a certain issue happen with your computer, such as a blue screen, or a program crash and you're not sure when it happened, or why it happened, most likely it's logged in the Windows 11 event viewer. Event Viewer can be found on any Windows 11 PC.
NOTE: Event Viewer has a lot of constantly updating the information found in it, including hundreds, if not thousands of messages. Do not freak out if you see a large number upon loading it. Sadly, Event Viewer is commonly used by technical support scammers, most of the errors listed here are non-user fixable errors or one-time events that should have little to no effect on your PC's functionality. You really do not have hundreds, if not thousands of issues with your PC, your PC just keeps really good notes about everything it does on a daily basis whether you realize it is doing all of this or not.
In this guide, we will break down getting to the event viewer, showing you how to view these messages and a brief idea of what each message type means.
Here is how to open Event Viewer:
1. Right-click on the Start button, typically found at the lower left corner of the screen, then click on the Event Viewer option.
2. In the Event Viewer window, click on the arrow next to Custom Views, and then click on Administrative Events.
This may take a few minutes to load, depending on the speed of your computer and the number of events.
As you can see in our example here, there are nearly 12,000 events on this specific PC.
If you can't recall 12,000 issues with your PC (or however many it may show for you), or any at all really, this is completely normal.
As we said at the start of this guide, there are plenty of background tasks happening on your computer all the time whether you realize it or not and Windows keeps "notes" or "logs" of all of these events - most, if not nearly all of them you will not realize even happened. An overwhelming majority, if not nearly all of these events really can be ignored and should be considered normal.
Here are the levels of events you'll see in Event Viewer and an idea of what each one means:
That summarizes the basics of the Event Viewer found on any Windows 11 PC!