Where can I get info showing what caused my PC to restart please?

Murphy's Law - my wife & I had just spent an hour or so checking out some Black Friday TV bargains & comparing three possible items. Just about to go ahead, clicked on 'Add to Basket' and the screen went black for several seconds. Then up came what appeared to be the usual MS message about installing a WU - don't touch the keyboard or words to that effect.

Made a coffee, looked at some TV and about an hour later when I looked again, my MS account sign-in screen (stage 2 - password) was showing. I thought it was the main WU Cumulative that failed earlier in the week but it wasn't. When I checked Update History there was nothing new added, my failed update was still showing and a check for updates brought up 'Up to Date.

Where can I look for details of this event please?

PS My first paragraph was for effect - I would have been in the deep doobies (a technical term) if the intrusion had caused my wife to lose the bargain - there were only two available. Fortunately there was one left when we got through again.

Hello Taffy, :)

The Event Viewer logs in the tutorial below may be able to help determine what caused the restart.

Read Shutdown Logs in Event Viewer in Windows Performance Maintenance Tutorials

Taffy,

You might also usefully look at update records in Event viewer -
1 Applications and services logs, Microsoft, Windows, WindowsUpdateClient, Operational, Events - 41, 31 {41 = successful update downloads, 31 = update download failures}
2 Windows logs, Setup {this records particular updates but not them all; it includes Event 4 restart warnings and Event 2 installation successful}
3 Windows logs, System, EventSources - WindowsUpdateClient, Event - 19 {update installation successes only}

Notes

• I find the presentation of #3 quite easy to export then work with because the description pane's General tab identifies the update concerned [whereas #1 forces you to dig inside the Details tab and that tab is not exported].
• Note that #3 includes updates to Apps making it, as far as I have been able to find out, the only place where App updates are identified.
• I only find #2 useful if I'm chasing down problems after having found an update listed in #1 but not in #3. I do not yet understand what gets included in #2; no pattern is apparent.

Denis

Thanks fdegrove (especially for the touch of humour!), Shawn & Try3. Some great stuff there and as python134r says, it's all stuff users like me need to experience'
I had some of the info/links bookmarked, saved in a Favourites folder on my desktop but lost the lot when I had to do a clean install, thanks to a bizarre Fall Creators October WU, so I'm slowly rebuilding my 'library' of helpful advice.

Denis - I've exported all those reports and will now work my way through them.
I try to be a 'glass half full' guy but it's difficult at times - it definately looked as if a Windows Update was about to be downloaded and if those reports enable me to confirm that, it might help to explain all the other big issues that I'm having with failed WUs. I must report them here next time and very much regret that I didn't.

Shawn - the only problem I had was when I clicked the link to get online help, it was sent to TechNet and every time I got a Page Not Found error - "search TechNet for more info". I don't know if that's something you'd want to deed back to your friends at TechNet, or whether it's a common problem of which thet're already aware.

Thanks again all - your help and empathetic response are much appreciated.

Can I mark two replies as the Answer?

Taffy078 said:

Shawn - the only problem I had was when I clicked the link to get online help, it was sent to TechNet and every time I got a Page Not Found error - "search TechNet for more info". I don't know if that's something you'd want to deed back to your friends at TechNet, or whether it's a common problem of which thet're already aware.

If you like, you might see if this below may help for that.

Source: Online Event Information

Windows 10: For those who can't get Event Log Online Help to work, this may workaround the issue.
Windows 10 Users and possibly others: That link is no longer supported and so: This will restore your registry, if you want, to defaults, and replace the url with a workaround one provided by HowToGeeks. The original poster of the solution was found here, I've just expanded it: Event Viewer Online Help redirected - Microsoft Community

Use this as a temporary workaround till they fix it, just copy and paste into a text file and save with extension '.reg' not '.txt' no quotes, and double click to have it modify the registry, or modify the registry yourself with regedit.

As one can see it points to a registry entry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Event Viewer

and modifies the MicrosoftRedirectionURL key to https://www.howtogeek.com/eventid

Someone discovered this, and posted it to answers today; I marked it as an answer, though microsoft doing it would be better. It uses a page that howtogeek made to at least pull up information on the internet, something I used to do manually.


Text to copy, paste and save as .reg file (anyname will do). Then doubleclick file, or manually repair.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Event Viewer]
"MicrosoftRedirectionProgram"=hex(2):00,00
"MicrosoftRedirectionProgramCommandLineParameters"=""
"MicrosoftRedirectionURL"="https://www.howtogeek.com/eventid"
"Old MicrosoftRedirectionURL"="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp"

Note: I added a copy of the old link in case you wanted to remember it.

thanks Shawn. I'm still working through, in between updates and other time-consuming matters. Back soon.

Since my last reply, the problem has continued so I kept a log. I’m 90% sure it’s not an overheating issue – on some occasions the laptop had only been on five minutes. I then thought I’d isolated the common factors: playing Lightning Pool (a onemorelevel.com game) using Chrome so yesterday I stopped going to that site (even though it’s respectable) – whenever I went there, there was a second or two’s delay while it loaded Flash.
But it happened again today. Here’s a snip of the history:

I’ll add further info in a minute.