Windows has a bunch of tools and features built in, some of them that are pretty advanced,
that hopefully you never have to use or only every once in a while. But I
think it's still good to at least know about them in case you do come across
a problem that you have no idea how to deal with, then one of these might ring
a bell and might lead you to a possible solution, or at least a place to start.
And this is not going to be a detailed tutorial on how to use all these,
more of just a quick overview of each. And if you have been watching my channel for a while,
you may have heard me mention these before, but it's always good to have a refresher. So
let's just jump in. First up, we have the Disk Management menu, which actually is important to
know about, because if you ever go and buy a new hard drive or a new SSD that's completely blank,
you may plug it in and realize, "Wait a minute, it's not showing up anywhere."
And that's because you probably need to initialize it using the
disk management. So it's good to know that that's a thing. And to do that,
it's actually pretty simple. You basically just right click on the drive and hit initialize
if there's the option to do that, but you can always look up a more detailed tutorial again.
Disk management also has a lot of other abilities like creating and adjusting partitions and also
assigning drive letters, that sort of thing. So pretty versatile if you have to mess around with
how disks are configured. Next up, I have another one that's kind of disk related,
and that is the DISKPART tool, which is a command line tool.
It does a lot of the same stuff as disk management, but it's actually quite a
bit more powerful. The trade-off of course is that there's no graphic interface. You
basically will use commands to list all the disks or partitions, and then you'll select
one and then perform actions on it. And it can do stuff that, like I said, disk management cannot.
For example, it can even convert file systems like from FAT32 to NTFS,
which I didn't even really know was possible until recently. So you can look up all the
possible stuff it can do, but again, I'm not going to go over all that. Moving on,
we have the hosts file, which can be found in the C:/Windows/System32/Drivers/etc folder.
And it's just called hosts, no file extension. What this file does is lets you override the IP
address that certain hosts will be directed to. And by that, I mean like a domain name,
basically. So you can see here, there are some built-in ones like localhost,
which directs to 127.0.0.1. And that's a really common one, but you can also use it to make
more memorable host names for like local PC IP addresses on your network or stuff like that.
Another thing you can do is so-called black hole a host, which basically means just,
if there's a website or domain that you don't want the computer to access,
you can simply force it to redirect somewhere nonsensical, such as the
localhost or a IP such as 100 and then two colons, which is a designated black hole IP.
And it'll just go nowhere, effectively blocking that host name. One easier way to mess with the
host file is actually with a PowerToys tool. PowerToys, if you're not familiar,
is a set of [tools] published by Microsoft. It's open source on GitHub,
and it's got a bunch of built-in tools, including one that is a hosts file editor.
So it basically creates a graphic user interface for adjusting the host file. Not that it's that
complicated in the first place, but it makes it a bit easier. So you can do stuff like toggling
entries, which just adds a comment in front of it, stuff like that. Up next we have the
task scheduler, which is pretty powerful, and it lets you simply schedule tasks.
And you can have it do anything from like running scripts or running
programs at designated times or any time the computer starts up. And if you go in there,
you'll actually see that a lot of programs use this to automatically
start at Windows startup to run updates and that sort of thing. So it's good to know about if you
are looking for maybe a program that you can't figure out why it keeps starting up.
Maybe it has a task in this task scheduler that's doing that. And you can also of course set up
your own, although that's again, probably going to require a tutorial. But good to know about if you
need something to happen at the same time every day, that's how you would probably do it. Next,
I can talk about the services menu, which is also called services.msc.
If you didn't know, services in Windows are basically pure background apps. There are things
that are probably running in the background, but don't have any kind of graphic user interface.
And a lot of people don't know these are there. So if you look in the taskbar for example, you might
think that all those icons are all the background tasks running, but there's probably quite a few
more that you wouldn't even know about that are running and only visible in the services menu.
Now, a lot of these are built-in Windows services that you do not want to mess with.
So I'm not saying that all background services are bad and you should disable them. No,
probably not. In fact, you probably don't want to mess with these unless
you know what you're doing, but this is another case where it's possible
if there is an app that keeps starting up and running in the background and
you can't figure out how, then it might be set to automatically start up as a service,
for example. If you want a more detailed explanation, I talked about the services menu in
another video where I was going over some ways to find startup apps that might be hidden, including
ones that use services. So that's probably the one to check out. But in this one, again, I'm
just letting you know that it exists if you didn't before know. Moving on, we have the Event Viewer,
which can definitely come in handy if you're troubleshooting a problem. Basically, it lists a
log of stuff that the Windows operating system has determined is like an error or a critical error or
just information, just basically a big log file, effectively. And there are several different
filters and categories you can look through that have different types of files and events logged.
But one example of when I'll use the Event Viewer is if I'm having some kind of weird issue with
Windows that seems consistent, maybe every once in a while there's like just a freeze for a
second and I can't figure out what the problem is. Maybe I'll look at the Event Viewer to see
if at the same time that that was frozen, maybe a bunch of errors appear in the Event Viewer.
And I can kind of check to see what that might have been caused by. You can look at
the details and sometimes it'll line up and tell you what might be causing this issue. So again,
that's where you probably want to know about that. Now next to we have Windows
Memory Diagnostic, which is a tool you can find searching Start Menu like the others.
And like the name suggests, it just runs a bunch of tests on your computer's memory or RAM,
and you can set it to do a basic one or advanced, and it'll tell you the results.
And this is good to know about because a lot of memory issues are very vague and weird,
I would say. There's a lot of times where if memory is the problem, you might never suspect it.
I have given several times an example from years ago where I was having a
weird graphical issue seemingly in a game called Battlefield 2. And you can see what
it looked like. There's like weird bars coming from all the objects. And of course,
you would probably assume that this is a problem with the GPU, but no,
it turned out to be bad memory in my computer that was causing this and other weird issues.
And it took me a long time to figure that out. I eventually ran some kind of memory diagnostic,
it turned up some errors, so I replaced the memory and never had an issue again. Next up,
we have the Resource Monitor, which I actually use quite a bit. And it lets
you see the usage of your computer in terms of the CPU, your disks, your memory, and network.
A lot of this info you can also see in the Task Manager, but it's not going to be nearly as
detailed. For example, in the Resource Monitor, you can see exactly how much network traffic is
being used, and even to which IP addresses and which programs specifically are using it. You
can also look at disk usage and what's being read or written to and even the specific files.
So if you're using a hard drive and you hear it chugging along and you're
wondering what's going on, you can look to see what is. I also use Rainmeter skins,
which are basically like little gadgets to monitor my computer's
performance metrics. So I can see how much of the CPU/GPU is being used. So
what I'll usually do is see if maybe I see something is downloading a lot of data.
I'm wondering what that is. I can look in the Resource Monitor. And same thing if
I see a lot of CPU usage, well I guess I could just look at the task manager,
but it could come in handy if I want more details. Now finally,
sort of related to the Event Viewer, we have the Reliability Monitor, which basically
shows a selection of the more important events and shows it on a day-to-day basis.
So if you don't want to dig through a bunch of Event Viewer logs, this might be an easier way
to do it. On the right-hand side, you can see it shows the type of events. So there's application
failures, Windows failures, miscellaneous failures, and then warnings, and just information.
And it also shows a graph with a reliability score from 1 to 10 that changes day-to-day.
So critical events cause it to go lower, but if there's no critical events,
it just kind of trends higher. And again, this could come in handy if maybe all of a
sudden your computer starts acting weird or sluggish. This might be something to
look at and see if there's been a drop in reliability or more errors than usual.
For example, when I went to look at this, I saw that there were a lot of errors caused
by LG Hub updater, which I thought I had not even running when Windows starts up.
So I don't even know why the updater is. And I realized that it was a background
service that I don't really want running. So then I went into the services menu,
like I mentioned before, and I can set it to manual.
So it'll only update theoretically when I actually run the program,
which is not very often. So hopefully now with the knowledge of these tools, if you didn't know
about them already, they might come in handy the next time you have some weird issue in Windows.
If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a big giant thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm.
And if you want to subscribe, I try to make videos about twice a week,
usually Wednesday and Saturday. If you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is
that one I mentioned before about how to find some sneaky hidden startup programs
that you might not be able to find otherwise, there's quite a few places they can be hiding.
You can just click on that right there. So thanks so much for watching and I'll see in the next one.