Windows Vista™ Inside Out

Understanding the Event Logs Summary

When you select the top-level folder in Event Viewer’s console tree, the Details pane displays summary information, as shown in Figure 22-2. This view lets you see at a glance if any significant events that might require your attention have occurred in the past hour, day, or week. You can expand each category to see the sources of events of that event type. Seeing a count of events of various types in various time periods is interesting—but not particularly useful in and of itself. However, by selecting an event type or an event source under Summary Of Administrative Events, you can then jump directly to those events, regardless of which logs they’re in. In the Action pane, simply click View All Instances Of ...