For most software that you install, there will be the ideal PC requirements provided so you can be assured of optimum performance for programs and games you will install on your PC. At times, varied differences as far as video specifications, memory and processor capacity will be stated. But while many would see the usual minimal requirements, you have to consider the fact on whether these will be sufficient to satisfy the level of performance you are expecting once these software programs are installed.

Based on experience, it would never hurt to be a step ahead. This entails making sure that you are installing the software on hardware that is a bit advanced. For example, if video card requirements are at least 128 MB, why not install a 256 MB video card if the difference is just a couple of bucks? Or perhaps if memory requires at least 256 RAM, why not go double like 512?

Some may call it overkill but they are really some form of making sure that you get best performance from these programs. Remember that if you go for minimal requirements, you will eventually find yourself wanting better performance and hence upgrading these concerned hardware peripherals

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A while back, there was a topic (Virtual Registry vs. "Real registry") in the Sysinternals Forums that brought up the question of how to set the virtualization-related flags of a registry key programmatically in Vista, rather than through the use of the REG.EXE tool's FLAGS switch. (For more information on the flags, see Mark Russinovich's article in TechNet Magazine, "Inside Windows Vista User Account Control"). Even before that topic in the forum, I had wondered how it was done but had not had a chance to explore. It didn't seem that many others were curious about it. That topic had resurrected the idea, but it quickly fell to the bottom of the list. I've finally gotten around to experimenting, and that leads to this write-up. I still don't see much in the way of this discussed anywhere, by searching for terms involved (data types, function param names, etc.), so hopefully this will help

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Previously, I had written about the puzzlers on the NTDebugging / Microsoft Advanced Windows Debugging and Troubleshooting blog - specifically, the most recent puzzler which involved reverse engineering some assembler. The answer was posted today - there were a lot of responses, and a lot of correct responses.

I had posted the hashes for my answer (which was correct), that I am now able to disclose...

void myfun( char* param1 )
{
    size_t local1 = strlen( param1 );
    for( int local2 = local1; local2 > 0; local2-- )
    {
        for( int local3 = 0; local3 < local2 - 1; local3++ )
        {
            if( *(param1+local3) > *(param1+local3+1) )
            {

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Over on the Microsoft Advanced Windows Debugging and Troubleshooting blog, they've been posting a "Puzzler" every Monday and providing the answers the following Friday.

The puzzlers are fun to participate in and it is interesting to read people's responses - everyone has their own ideas and own experiences to draw off of.

With the third puzzler, the blog authors have decided to make the challenge a bit more difficult - the latest puzzler requires one to reverse engineer some assembler.

I've not got much experience with reverse engineering assembler - I can read some assembler and can usually get a very basic idea of what a targeted chunk of code is doing. So it was an interesting challenge for me to attempt to C-ify the assembler they provided. It doesn't appear that the authors are posting the responses until they reveal the answer (makes sense to me!). But I thought I'd post hashes of my response, which I'll also post once the NT Debugging blog authors post

In Windows Vista, users can have an extensive System Health Report generated for them in helping troubleshoot performance and reliability issues on their PC or to see how healthy their PC is in general. For the average user, this probably won’t mean anything. But for me, I’m the type of user that really likes having the ability to create reports that tell me about my PC so I was really excited to find this ability in Windows Vista.

This evening I decided to generate a report on my main desktop PC for the first time and see what it says. To have a System Health Report generated:

1. Open Start Menu.
2. Right-click on “Computer” and click “Properties”.
3. In the System Properties window, click on your Windows Experience Index rating.
4. In the Performance Information and Tools window, under “Tasks” in the left-hand options pane click “Advanced Tools”.
5. Under Advanced Tools window choose “Generate a system health report” at the bottom.

The report generates after about 60 seconds of testing. Here is my System Health Report I generated this evening:

As you can see, any sort of errors or warnings for your system are displayed

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Today, Nick told you about some updates to the tools in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) from Barcelona, Spain at TechEd IT Forum. I recently had a chance to give one of the components of MDOP - the Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) 6.0 - a try. DaRT is an excellent set of tools for IT Professionals to troubleshoot unresponsive PCs and removing viruses and malware off infected PCs in their environment. DaRT 6.0  also now has the ability for IT Professionals to conduct offline removal of malware and viruses from infected PCs.

The first thing I noticed when I started using DaRT is that it provides two options to the IT Professional: a way to analyze crash files from unresponsive PCs through the Crash Analysis Wizard, and a way to create a startup disc with the necessary tools in fixing an unresponsive PC that is unable to boot into Windows called ERD Commander.

I first took a look at the Crash Analysis Wizard.

The Crash Analysis Wizard allows an IT Professional to take a crash dump file (*.dmp files associated with a system crash) and analyze it and get important bits of information that could

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