Action Center in Windows 7

Before you start

Objectives: Learn where to find and how to use Action Center in Windows 7.

Prerequisites: you have to know what is Action Center in Windows.

Key terms: Action Center, Windows 7.


 Action Center

One of the important tool to help us troubleshoot our system is the Action Center. The Action Center icon is available in the Taskbar notification area (icon is marked yellow on the picture).

 1 Action Center Taskbar

Action Center Icon

When we click the icon, we will see the current status. In our case we have 3 important messages. We can click on the “Open Actin Center” to see more details.

 2 Action Center

Action Center

We can see different items grouped together, In our case we have one Security item (Firewall status), and two maintenance items (problem with Adobe Reader, and backup).

Action Center will propose actions to resolve problems. For example, for the backup problem the solution is to set up backup. For a problem with Adobe Reader, we can see message details. For Firewall we could enable it, but this option is disabled by the system administrator in our case, since Firewall is installed and managed elsewhere.

The typical and most important things in Action Center is the Security section. Action Center will warn us if we have problems with virus protection, Windows Update, Firewall and malware.

We can disable all messages if we want, in the Action Center settings (link to settings is available in the left menu).

 3 Action Center Settings

Action Center Settings