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Has your new Windows Vista system already started crashing? If yes, then it is important for you to know what causes system crashes and try to resolve or prevent them from happening. In this article, we are going to discuss some of the common causes of Vista crashes and how you can avoid them.

Registry problems are one of the main causes of several Windows Vista errors and system crashes. This is because the registry is a central hierarchal database repository that comprises all information related to hardware and software configuration, system setup, and user preferences. Now, whenever you install/uninstall applications, change system configuration, or perform any other activity such as browse the Web, open and create new files, and so on, information is accessed, added, or removed from the registry. In the process, quite often some unwanted information, such as outdated, incorrect and invalid entries make their way into the registry and unnecessarily corrupt, damage and fragment its files.

A damaged and fragmented registry, full of invalid and corrupt entries, tends to generate errors on your Vista system and cause frequent system freezes and crashes.

The best way to fix registry problems and restore the registry to a healthy state is by using a reliable and efficient Vista registry cleaner tool. This tool automates the process of scanning the registry for errors and repairing them. When you repair registry errors, many Vista errors, related to DLLs, drivers, and other system files are also fixed and your system is restored to a healthy state.

Registry cleaners also enable you to defrag the Vista registry. When you defrag the registry, the following things happen:

• All fragmented registry files are consolidated and reindexed, speeding up the time the registry takes to provide the required information to the programs and drivers accessing it. As a result, the performance of your Windows PC becomes better and the chances of Vista crashes are minimized.
• When you uninstall applications or when unwanted registry entries are removed when you repair the registry using the registry cleaner tool, deleted entries may leave behind their place holders or empty registry keys. These empty keys unnecessarily increase the size of the registry and make it unstable. Defragging the registry using a registry cleaner tool helps you in getting rid of these unwanted, empty entries and enables you to decrease the size of the registry.

Before you perform any registry repair task, you must make sure that you back up the Windows Vista registry first. This is possible by using your registry cleaner tool. Using the backup and restore option of a registry cleaner tool, you can both backup and restore the Vista registry with just a few mouse clicks.

Many Vista errors such as mci32 vista errors occur when programs installed on the Vista system need DLL files that are not shipped with the Vista operating system. If your system crashes or generates errors for such files, then to resolve the issue, you will first have to copy the missing DLL file to its location on the disk and then register it by running the “regsvr32 /i ”

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IDG News Service —

Dell's net income dropped 48 percent for the fourth quarter, the company said Thursday, as it also announced it is increasing its cost-cutting goal to US$4 billion by the end of fiscal 2011 as it tries to come to terms with the recession.

The company recorded net income of $351 million for the fourth quarter ended Jan. 30, a 48 percent drop from the $679 million it recorded in last year's fourth quarter. Net income per share was $0.18. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected net income of $496 million.

Revenue fell to $13.4 billion, a 16 percent drop from a year ago, and short of analyst estimates of $14.2 billion.

Reduced IT spending has taken its toll on the company, with spending deferred until the economy improves, CEO Michael Dell said in a statement. However, the company is taking other steps to reduce costs to adapt to the recession.

The company now aims to reduce costs by $4 billion by the end of fiscal 2011, a change from the original target of $3 billion announced in May.

The steps Dell has taken in the past to cut costs include compensation reduction, staff cuts, restructuring its product design and distribution, and realigning its manufacturing strategy by shutting down factories.

"Within our business, we're being very disciplined in managing costs, generating profitability and cash flow, and investing in ways that separate Dell from others today and when the economy inevitably improves," Dell said.

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For 21 years, Dell has been the business media's most dearly beloved company. Since Michael Dell founded the company in his University of Texas dorm room in 1984, the company has been hugged and kissed and fondled by crush-struck business journalists (and analysts and investors).

Dell has been adored because it is the very model of a flat-earth, New Economy business. It takes orders directly from customers over the phone and the Internet, sources components around the world, and assembles and delivers them with a hyper-efficient supply chain. Add in an ethos of responsive consumer service, and you get a clean, organically grown giant. In an age of corporate decadence, Dell has had no significant run-ins with regulators or the Securities and Exchange Commission. Among the best-performing big stocks in the 1990s boom, it bent but didn't break during the bust. Fiscal 2005 revenues were $49 billion, placing it 28^th on the Fortune 500. And Dell has continued to take market share from rivals like IBM and the combined Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, with 18 percent of the global market for PCs in 2004. At today's price, the company is worth a whopping $85 billion. And seldom is heard a discouraging word about regular-guy founder and chairman Michael Dell, whose $14.2 billion fortune places him ninth on the Forbes 400. Great guy, superior business model, fantastic stock.

But all of a sudden, Dell is getting walloped. There has been a disappointing earnings report, complaints about customer service, unflattering stock charts, and a rash of articles questioning Dell's future—Business Week had two negative Dell articles in its current issue, and the Financial Times had a critical takeout last week. Is Dell still "a wonder of the modern business world," as the Financial Times put it? (Here's the link.) Or is it in trouble?

Dell's disappointing quarter was the proximate cause of the negative press. On Aug. 11, the company reported that it shipped 9.1 million computers in the second quarter and racked up $13.4 billion in sales, "15 percent higher than the same quarter last year." For 99 percent of companies, that's a blowout. For Dell, it was a disappointment. Why? The company had projected a 16 percent to 18 percent increase in sales, and it represented the first time in several years that Dell failed to meet the earnings estimates. What's more, executives ratcheted down expectations for revenue growth in the current quarter. The stock has fallen 11 percent since the announcement.

The quarter and the reaction to it have helped bring into focus longer-term issues. First, there's Dell's stock. Over the last five years, Dell has merely kept pace with the S&P 500. And in the last year, Dell has underperformed the NASDAQ. Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard is enjoying a run of positive coverage, as new CEO Mark Hurd begins to clean up Carly Fiorina's mess. (Here's an ugly chart comparing H-P and Dell's performances over the last year.)

Dell had the bad luck to tick off a very powerful blogger. The company is justly known for its fantastic customer service. But any time you engage in tens of millions of customer contacts, there are bound to be errors. It was Dell's misfortune that one of those errors affected a person with a huge megaphone, blogger Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis' blow-by-blow account of his Dell hell has become an Internet phenomenon.

Dell is also becoming a victim of its size. Maintaining 18 percent annual revenue growth is a challenge for any company. But it's a particular challenge for a company that A) has an annual revenue base of $49 billion; and B) sells products whose prices fall significantly each year. To increase sales by 15 percent, Coca-Cola has to sell 15 percent more cases. To increase its PC revenues by 15 percent, Dell probably has to increase unit sales by 25 percent. As Business Week noted, "about 79% of Dell's $49 billion in sales last year came from desktops and notebook computers, both categories in which prices are falling." Dell is trying to cope with the continual decline in prices and to goose revenue growth by investing more in the production and sales of flat-screen televisions, monitors, and printers. But the price competition in these new lines of business is just as bitter as it is in PCs.

Dell also has to rely increasingly on new markets, which is proving tricky. The techniques that allowed it to dominate the U.S. market don't necessarily travel well. The Financial Times reported that in China, a crucial market for Dell's future, the cultural and economic infrastructure for direct-to-consumer marketing doesn't exist. "The strongest evidence that Dell's model is not yet matched to the China market is the appearance of numerous unofficial 'agents' who buy its computers and sell them on for a profit," the FT notes.

Despite this rash of bad news, it's too early to write either the Dell-is-doomed or Dell-is-back story. Dell's business model isn't broken, and it's not fundamentally challenged. No, for every trend, there comes a time when you can no longer simply extrapolate the results of the past into the future. It happens to every great company and to every great brand. Dell's stock still trades at a significant premium to the market. Investors are willing to pay far more for a dollar of Michael Dell's earnings than they are for a dollar of the S&P 500's earnings today because they think his will grow faster. To a degree, Dell has finally fallen victim to the same malaise that has affected the other gigantic stock stars of the 1990s: Wal-Mart, General Electric, Microsoft, and Citigroup. They have undergone ungainly transitions from supercharged growth to merely impressive growth. At 21, Dell has belatedly entered its awkward adolescence.

Rank Noodle

The construction of Pakistan’s tallest 47-storey IT Tower adjacent to Civic Centre began on Friday, 15th January 2008 with the signing of an agreement in Kuala Lumpur. City Nazim Syed Mustafa Kamal signed the agreement on behalf of the City District Government Karachi and Gochi Kon on behalf of the Malaysian construction company IM Technologies, a consortium of IGM Investment, Jable-Ali Limited and Mall Park Limited. The IT Tower, first of its kind in Pakistan is expected to be completed in 24 months with an estimated cost of $200 million, consisting world’s largest Call Centre with 10,00 seats where 30,000 educated youngsters will have a opportunity to work as Call Agents, 3 shopping mall of international standards, 250 Rooms Five Star Hotel, 2100 car parking space while 50,000 people will be given employment opportunities. Addressing at the signing ceremony City Nazim Syed Mustufa Kamal was confident that the Tower will be completed much before the expected time, he thanked Malaysian companies and investments made by them in ongoing mega projects in Karachi and said that their cooperation will prove helpful in bringing the two countries closer to each other. He further added that the importance of the project can be judged from the fact that 4,000 out of 10,000 call centre seats have already been booked before the beginning of work. It should be noted here that Ko-ordination Group - KRG has been following with the concerned authorities for last 10 years which is also on media records to establish an IT Tower (IT Park) in the city finally has been materialized as the Tower would open new doors of employment opportunities to capable youth and serve as an institution of highly professional and world class IT experts who can enable Pakistan to be considered as major IT force alongwith ensuring advancement and innovation in the line of work, resulting in not only well-development of Karachi, but overall economic progress and prosperity of our beloved Pakistan.

So-called broadband speed tweaks are techniques to improve performance of DSL and cable Internet connections. Home networking enthusiasts started experimenting with cable and DSL tweaks many years ago, when broadband Internet services first became popular.

Performance tweaks for low-speed (dialup) Internet often do not work for broadband links. Additionally, while broadband speed tweaks originally focused on increasing the performance of general Web surfing, speed tweaks are now more commonly made to tune specific applications like P2P file sharing systems and games.

Limitations of Broadband Speed Tweaks

First, broadband tweaks should be made only after your network is tested and running reliably. Speed tweaks are performance optimizations only, not designed to fix installation errors or basic network configuration issues.

You should expect broadband tweaks might yield only small speed increases, and then only in certain situations. For example, a tweak to improve the performance of one online game may only benefit that title and then only initially when it is loading. Broadband tweaks may help certain applications (like games) but at the same time slow down others (like Web browsing). In general, assume any performance benefits you obtain may be on the order of 10-20% gain rather than 100-200%.

Finally, speed tweaks also can create instability on some networks. Depending on the type of equipment and Internet service you use, some tweaks will be technically incompatible and need to be avoided.

Types of Broadband Speed Tweaks

The most common broadband tweaks involve adjusting various parameters of the TCP/IP network protocol, typically:

• TCP receive window size
• Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU)
• Maximum Segment Size (MSS)
• Time-To-Live (TTL)

The Microsoft Windows Registry contains default values for TCP/IP parameters. You can apply these speed tweaks to your computers by using a Registry editor or the TCP Optimizer utility (see below) to change some of the default values on each, rebooting the computers each time. Other operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X provide alternative mechanisms to tune TCP/IP parameters.

Another common broadband tweak entails manipulating Web browser settings. For example, suppressing the download of large images saves network bandwidth that can be used instead to download other data faster.

Finally, though less common, a few speed tweaks modify settings on routers and modems. For example, TCP/IP MTU settings can be changed on a broadband router separate from individual computers on the network.

About Web Accelerators for Broadband Tweaks

Speed tweaks have been traditionally applied to the network by an administrator manually, one device at a time, but in recent years software applications have been developed to help automate and maintain tweaks.

So-called Internet download accelerators are pre-packaged software programs that automatically apply speed tweaks to a computer. Installing and running an accelerator program will automatically make the Registry, Web browser and other configuration changes. The more sophisticated applications collect information about your computers and network and apply tweaks intelligently to ensure maximum benefit.

While many Web accelerators are designed specifically for dialup networks, examples of accelerator applications useful for broadband are:

• Download Accelerator Plus
• Google Web Accelerator
• Netfury
• ONSPEED

Making Broadband Tweaks Work

Because speed tweaks can cause computer and network crashes if made improperly, test each change methodically. If possible, use a proven Web accelerator program rather than configuring tweaks manually, and test each change individually before making the next one.

To determine whether a speed tweak is working, use an Internet speed test service to measure your Internet performance before and after making a tweak. In addition, try local file transfers, Web downloads, online games, and other applications you use often to assess whether a tweak makes any noticeable difference. Do not hesitate to undo a change if you cannot observe any benefit.