If you’re a Windows XP user, you may have noticed that your event log is full of errors. This is because the Windows XP system doesn’t properly keep track of events that happen during the startup and shutdown process. This can cause problems when you need to troubleshoot an issue or fix a bug, because you won’t be able to find any information about what happened during those crucial moments. To fix this problem, you’ll need to use a utility called Event Viewer. This program will help you track down all the events that took place during your startup and shutdown processes, and it will also show you which ones were caused by errors. You can then use these errors as clues to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. If you’re not sure how to use Event Viewer, or if you don’t have it installed on your computer, we recommend using one of our other articles on how to fix problems with Windows XP. In this article, we’ll show you how to set up Event Viewer on Windows 7 and 8.1 so that it works properly for both systems.
You can easily fix this problem by changing the event logs to overwrite old events regardless of the date, or just increase the size that the log is allowed to grow to.
Note: If your event log is so huge within 7 days that you are getting this error, there’s probably something seriously wrong. You should inspect your event log to understand what is causing all of the errors… more on that in a future article.
Increasing Event Log Size
Open up Event Viewer by typing in eventvwr into the Start \ Run box, or you can find it under Administrative tools section of Control Panel.
You’ll notice over on the right-hand side of the window that the current size of my Application and System Event Logs are 512 KB…
Now you can right-click on one of the Event Logs in the list, and choose Properties from the menu.
In this dialog you can do a number of things… you could clear the log, increase the size, or just set the system to overwrite events as needed.
I chose to increase the maximum size of the event log, and then also to overwrite events as needed.
For those of you using Windows Vista, you’ll notice that the default settings in Vista are to overwrite as needed, and the maximum size is way bigger. Guess my setting choices make sense then…
Again, if your Application or System event logs are growing so gigantic that you are getting this error, you should really look into the root cause by carefully examining the entries in the logs.
