As a user, you do not always immediately notice on the 'outside' of Windows 10 if something goes wrong. Under the hood, something constructive could possibly go wrong that eventually translates into a nasty crash. It doesn't hurt to keep a finger on the pulse every now and then.
To start with, the old credo of course 'if it ain't broken, don't fix it' applies to Windows 10. In other words: as long as you as a user do not notice unpleasant things while using this operating system, you don't have to worry much. It changes when you notice that your computer is behaving a bit 'weird' every now and then. And that weirdness is mainly a matter of feeling. After all, you know your computer best because you work with it every day (or at least regularly). And so you may see things that weren't there before. It could be harmless things introduced with the umpteenth update. Or something really bad is going on. Think of a computer that suddenly becomes very slow at set times. Or tools and software that don't quite do what they're supposed to do anymore.
In those cases, you can quickly check the health of your system without consulting the complex logs that are barely comprehensible to the average person. Click on the magnifying glass next to the start button and type the text reliability history. Usually you only need to tap a part; the link to this part often appears after a few letters in the search results above. Click on this link and you will see a window with a graph. The Y-axis has a value ranging from zero to ten. Ideally, your system should have a score of 10. In practice you can assume that some software will crash once during use, which pulls the score down.
It is fair to say that less important events also lower the score. For example, if your shabby zip tool (to name a few) crashes regularly, this leads to a low reliability check. Not entirely fair, because such a program crash usually does not directly affect the system stability. You should be more concerned about Windows components crashing frequently. There may be something disturbing going on that requires further investigation. Since you can also see the installation history of updates, software and other things in this window, you may be able to find out when system components started crashing. You can then remove an update that caused this.
Problem Reports
The Problem Reports tool goes a step further, which can also be started via the magnifying glass. Here you see an overview of all issues that were considered important enough to be reported to Microsoft. Think, for example, of failed Windows updates. Via Reliability History you can then find out whether this is a permanent error and the update was never installed, or whether it was successful after a retry.
In the first case, you can try again via Windows Updates, or try to find out which program threw a spanner in the works. An option with disruptive updates is sometimes to temporarily pause your virus scanner and then perform the update. After that action, it is best to scan your entire system for malware, you never know what sneaked in during the shutdown. If it is not entirely clear what is meant by a reported problem, you can double-click an item in Problem Reports. But the chance that you will then become a lot wiser, we consider small since the often cryptic descriptions...
Despite this, both the mentioned tools are practical to find out repetitive problems. And possibly take action, for example to check whether a new version of a program that keeps crashing is available.
