Event Log Error Interpreter

What a Windows Event ID means — and whether it is worth doing anything about.

What you paste

Parsed in your browser — never uploaded

Result

12 events in this reference

Several of the most-searched Windows events are harmless, and the search results for them almost universally recommend a fix. DCOM 10016 is the clearest case — Microsoft has published guidance saying it can be ignored and that editing permissions to silence it risks breaking the component. Reading whether an event matters is worth more than reading what it means.

Diagnostic telemetry
10016 — DistributedCOM permission errorMicrosoft has published guidance saying these can be safely ignored, and that editing the registry and DCOM permissions to silence them — which is what almost every search result instructs — risks breaking the component instead. It is the most-searched harmless event in Windows.
Safe to ignore
41 — Kernel-Power: the system rebooted without cleanly shutting downThis is a symptom with no cause attached, which is why it frustrates people: it says the machine stopped abruptly and nothing more. Power supply, overheating, failing RAM and a hard freeze all produce exactly this. Look for a 1001 BugCheck immediately before it — if there is one, the crash was a blue screen and has a stop code to work with.
Check it
6008 — The previous system shutdown was unexpectedUseful only for its timestamp. Match it against what was running, and against 41 and 1001 in the same window.
Context
1001 — BugCheck — a blue screen occurredThe one worth acting on. It carries the stop code, which names a cause where 41 does not. Take the code from here rather than from a photograph of the screen.
Act on it
1000 — Application errorThe faulting module is what matters, not the application. A crash inside a graphics or audio driver DLL points at the driver rather than at the program that happened to call it.
Context
7000 — A service failed to startCheck the service name and its dependencies. Frequent after an uninstall that left a service registered with its binary removed.
Check it
7034 — A service terminated unexpectedlyA rising count on the same service is worth pursuing. A single occurrence around a reboot usually is not.
Check it
51 — A paging error occurred on a diskTake this seriously and check the drive health. Paging errors frequently precede a drive failure by weeks, and they appear long before anything is visibly wrong.
Act on it
153 — The IO operation was retriedOccasional retries happen on healthy systems. A pattern of them, especially alongside 51, points at the drive or its cable.
Check it
2004 — Resource exhaustion detectedThe process list in the event is the useful part. It names what was consuming memory at the moment it ran out, which is otherwise very hard to reconstruct afterwards.
Check it
4625 — An account failed to log onVolume is what matters. A handful is normal; hundreds from one source on a machine reachable from the internet is not.
Context
129 — Reset to device issuedA serious storage signal, frequently a failing drive, a cable, or a controller driver problem. Back up before investigating.
Act on it

What this cannot tell you

  • Covers the events people actually search for rather than the thousands Windows defines. For anything else the event's own description in Event Viewer is usually more informative than a lookup.
  • Event IDs are only unique within a source. The same number from a different source means something else entirely, so check the source name alongside it.
  • Says whether an event is worth acting on. It cannot diagnose the underlying fault from the ID alone.
  • Parsed in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and what you paste is not stored.

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