if you use Windows for office applications or to browse the internet you may not realize there is a management console that you can run that allows you to build a customized view of utilities that can help you when you're troubleshooting This is accessed by running mmc.exe and obviously the MMC stands for the Microsoft Management Console When you start the console it's empty but you can add additional utilities into this view so that everything is listed on this one screen So from here you can see I've added event viewer disk management taskuler and other utilities Let's start the management console on my computer We'll simply type mmc and we will run that command It asks us if we would like this app to make changes to the device and we would And here is our empty Microsoft Management Console This of course starts as an empty console but it's very easy to add additional functions by going to the file pulld down menu and choosing the option to add and remove a snap-in The snap-in is the list of these different utilities that you can add into the Microsoft Management Console And there are a number of utilities to add Let's add computer management And we'll click add When we add this particular snap-in it asks if we would like to use this to manage our local computer or a different computer that may be on our network In this case we'll choose our local computer and choose finish And you can see that has moved computer management local into that right window Let's also add device manager And we can see that's added to the right side And we'll also load disk management as well And again we're going to choose this computer for disk management And then we'll click okay And you can see on the left side we've now populated those three utilities into the Microsoft Management Console And we can easily access any one of them by clicking on that particular utility and accessing all of the features of each one of those functions I've now built a customized view of the different functions that I would like to have available And I would like to save this console by again choosing the file pull down menu choosing the save option and then we'll simply call this PM v1 and save this particular console We can now pull up this management console at any time and I can move from one configuration to another by loading that configuration from disk One of the utilities we can add into this list is the event viewer This gives you a consolidated view of everything that's happening inside of your Windows operating system This is effectively your Windows log viewer and it separates things into different categories You'll probably see categories for application security setup and system You'll see that some of these events are marked asformational but they could be marked as a warning error critical successful audit or failure audit If you wanted to start up the event viewer individually you could start it as its own application by running event vwwr.msc In our management console if we click the event viewer you'll see the number of events that we've had over time There are administrative events what we may have recently viewed and a summary of the log information If you want to quickly view a category of logs you can choose them from the left menu Let's choose the application Windows logs and it lists all of the applications that are running on our system and we can view the current status of a particular log For example this is a log for a source called VSSS This is the volume shadow copy service and it tells us that we had an error associated with that service It gives us details on what that error may be This allows you to find exactly what you're looking for very quickly without having to page through many different log entries A useful tool for examining information about your storage system is the disk management utility Disk management allows you to see all of the different storage drives that are installed into your computer and how those drives may be partitioned and what file systems they might be running You can run this directly from your management console or open it separately using disk mgmt.msc One important thing to keep in mind when you're working with disk management or any function dealing with our storage drives is that you could potentially delete data So make sure if you're making any significant changes inside of disk management that you always have a backup of that data Here's the disk management function on my local computer You can see I have a single drive and it is split into three separate partitions Two of these partitions do not have drive letters associated with them This would be our recovery partition and an EFI system partition This is used by the operating system during the startup process or when you're trying to install new software on your computer There's also a partition that contains the bulk of our operating system This is our C drive You can see there is a drive letter associated with it This is a drive that is formatted with NTFS and it is encrypted with Bit Locker which is a full disc encryption utility This also tells us that this is a healthy partition It is used for boot We have our page file on this drive Crash dumps are stored to this partition and this is a basic data partition If you have other storage drives and partitions on the system they will also appear in this disk management front end If you right mouse click on this partition you'll notice you have options to make changes You can change the drive letter and the paths that are used You can shrink this particular volume And if you have additional space on this drive or if you have additional drives you can choose to extend the volume or mirror the information across separate physical drives Again you want to be very careful about making any changes inside of this utility because you could potentially lose data on that storage drive The taskuler utility allows you to run applications at a particular date time or on a recurring basis There are also a number of predefined tasks and schedules that are built into Taskuler which makes it very easy to automate functions inside of Windows And if you have a large number of different tasks that you're running you can separate them into folders to keep everything organized inside of Taskuler If you want to run Taskuler by itself you can run task sc The main screen of Taskuler will show you all of the tasks that have run in the last 24 hours You can change that time frame to widen it to the last 7 days or the last 30 days If you choose the option for your taskuler library it shows you all of the tasks that are currently configured For example I have one configured which is the Microsoft update task that it runs at 10:50 a.m every day And it gives you information about how that task is configured You can modify these by changing the triggers tab the actions that occur the conditions that this is waiting for and any detailed settings about this task If you'd like to add your own task that runs at a particular time and day you simply create a task on the right side menus and put in the name of the utility that you'd like to run what day and time you'd like to run it and make sure that any of the conditions or settings are configured for that particular task Most operating systems have some type of device driver that allows the operating system to talk to the hardware of your computer To be able to see this device driver and understand the relationship between the operating system and the hardware you can use the device manager option within your Microsoft Management Console Generally the drivers that you'll find inside of this list have been created specifically for the operating system that you're using So if you're running Windows 10 these will be Windows 10 device drivers If you're using Windows 11 these are probably Windows 11 device drivers There might be some situations where a device driver has been specifically written to work across multiple operating systems but most of the time you're downloading and installing a device driver that is specific to this operating system If you want to run device manager by itself you run devmt.msc Device manager organizes all of your hardware into different groups For example if you wanted a list of all of the printers associated with your computer you can right mouse click on printer to expand that category and see all of the device drivers for printers Let's do the same thing for display adapters We'll also expand the keyboard options that we're using and the option for monitors If we double click on any one of these it brings up the device driver properties and we can see the name of the driver that's being used any details associated with the driver any recent events associated with this device driver and what resources are being used inside of our system to support this hardware Many device drivers also have their own process for installation and update There are also options if you right mouse click on a driver to update disable or uninstall this device driver We rely on certificates to provide information about ownership of a computer or to enable encryption functions within our operating system If you'd like to view all of the certificates associated with your computer you'll find that under the certificate manager You'll notice that you can run this from theert mgr.msc option Here's a view of the certificate manager Inside of theert manager we can add remove or view the certificates that are already installed For example you might want to see all of the trusted certification authorities or CAS that are used by your browser So if you doubleclick on the trusted root certification authorities and choose the option for certificates you will see all of those certificates listed We can right mouse click on any one of these to open the cert and look at the details of this particular certification Windows is a multi-user operating system and you can configure multiple users to be able to use your computer or connect to your computer across the network You can configure rights and permissions for those users and group them together into separate groups using the local users and groups utility There are a number of users that are built into Windows for example the administrator user and the guest user Everyone else is considered a regular user inside of Windows There are also a number of predefined groups such as administrators users backup operators power users and others And you can of course add additional users and additional groups into this list From the local users and groups option we can doubleclick on any of these to see what the options might be This is a relatively new Windows build So there are very few users that are listed You can see the administrator user the default account and the guest are listed along with my user professor on this particular computer If you'd like to add more users you can right mouse click and choose new user and fill in the details to add another user to your computer One of the challenges we often have with troubleshooting problems is many of those issues occur in the past and by the time we're looking at that computer the problem is long gone One of the ways to track resource utilization over time would be with the performance monitor utility We can gather a great deal of statistics from a single computer by using the performance monitor And if you wanted to launch performance monitor by itself you simply run perfmon.msc We're able to collect metrics over a very long time frame with performance monitor and you can collect hundreds of different resource metrics inside of Windows including operating system metrics for disk memory CPU and then we can also set alarms and alerts So if we exceed a particular resource level we can have a notification sent directly to us We can also collect this information and store it on this computer over hours days or weeks This allows us to go back in time and see everything that may have occurred with that particular resource You can also create reports that allow you to view that information over time so that you can instantly see a graphical view of exactly what's occurred on this computer Here's the default view of performance monitor You can see it's looking at memory information network interface details physical disk information and processor information We can also add additional monitoring tools into this view by starting the performance monitor graph Here's the default view of performance monitor You can see that it's not currently collecting any particular metrics To add additional metrics into this list we'll click the plus sign and you will see that a large number of categories of counters show up on the left hand side This is a huge amount of information You certainly wouldn't want to add all of them to your computer at one time But in this list let's scroll down under the processor section And if I highlight this we can view all of the different metrics that are collected Let's choose all of them by default We'll click the add option And it puts the processor option on the right side And we'll click okay Now we're going to start gathering metrics about how the processor of this system happens to be performing And you can see that all of these different options are being collected and displayed on this graph in real time This means that we can begin collecting this data We can go away and if the problem on this computer occurs again we can come back and look at the historical view of these metrics to see if we might be able to break down where the problem might be occurring on this computer As the administrator of your Windows system you can have granular control over what features might be available to different users The way to manage this process is through the group policy editor If you're editing policies for an individual system then you would be using the local group policy editor or gpedit.msc But if you're part of a larger organization that has active directory infrastructures then you're probably going to use group policy management console that integrates with that centralized active directory management You'll find that under gpmc.msc Here's the local computer policy on my computer And from here you can see there are two main categories of computer configuration and user configuration If we select user configuration and look at the administrative templates we could view options For example the desktop Here are the options that we have available to manage what people can do on the desktop of this computer For example if you want to hide and disable all items on the desktop you can configure that inside of the policy manager so that when someone logs in they don't see anything on the desktop of their computer