Event Viewer is my best friend. Whenever I went into a problem, I always went there first to gather more information before I decided to do anything else. Often it helped. But I always wished that I can do more with these event logs. For example, sometimes I want to get alerted when some critical error occurs, sometimes I just want to launch a specifically program when a warning message pops in. I can’t do none of these without having a 3rd party application in place prior to Windows 7. Now I can.

Let’s say I found an error message in my application event logs that I had no idea when it happened, and what caused it.

To get more information, I can now right-click the event and select Attach a Task to this Log, or highlight the event and pick the same task from the Action panel at the right side.

Then, a Create Basic Task Wizard appeared, type the name of task in Task box, and some of information about this task in Description box, and click Next.

And click another Next.

In Action step, there are three type of actions available to select.

Selecting each option will bring you different window at next. For this case, I picked Display a message.

That’s it, click Finish to close the wizard.

Next time when the same error happens, this pre-defined message box will be popping up onto my desktop. Nice.

What’s behind the scene?

What’s really behind thing is the wizard we just walked through created a on-event task in Task Scheduler, which will be triggered by an event from Event Viewer.