What’s your Windows Vista reliability index score?

The reliability monitor is a great part of Windows Vista, which helps you keep a close eye on how your PC is behaving 'under the bonnet'. On the day of your Windows Vista installation, your PC is given a reliability index score of 10, which is the perfect score.

As your PC runs, the monitor finds any problems and logs them. The more reliable your system the higher the score stays, and if things go wrong, the score goes down.

The beauty of this is that you can find the exact causes of instability on your PC, and nip problems in the bud, making finding the problems behind crashes possible.

To find your index score, search for Reliability in the start menu, and start up the monitor. In the left-hand pane select Monitoring Tools and Reliability Monitor. You can then see a synopsis of the last month, and select any day since Windows Vista was installed on your PC.

Let us know your reliability index score in our online poll and the results will be printed in issue 14 out on January 30. 

Any problems with your system will be listed underneath, so you can deal with offenders before they start wrecking your beautiful Windows Vista experience.

Unfortunately, it’s too late for my PC. The tonnes of software I have to test, which is often in an unreliable beta phase, means that I have an index score of 1.8/10.

I've therefore set myself a challenge to get this up to a reasonable level by Christmas, and will report back on how I did.