Windows Event Viewer is slow on newer versions of Windows

Solution 1:

Helge Klein has a great blog post showing how to do add the earliar version of the MMC snapin back - How to Get Back Windows XP’s Fast Event Viewer in Windows 7.

Basically you have to run the command

regsvr32 els.dll

from an elevated privilege command prompt and it will then show up as an MMC snapin called Classic Event Viewer. I'm very happy to have found my cheese :-)

Solution 2:

I just want to quickly scan the various different event logs as quickly as possible.

Quickly scan Event Viewer you say... how about PowerShell:

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{logname='system'; level=2; StartTime=(Get-Date).date}

This will immediately return all Error events from the System log that occurred this day.

Want to look two days back?

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{logname='system'; level=2; StartTime=(Get-Date).AddDays(-1).date}

How about just the Information Events generated by Outlook from the Application log?

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{logname='application'; level=4; ProviderName="Outlook"; StartTime=(Get-Date).date}

Pretty hard to beat that.