Did you miss the first two parts of this story? Read "Fix Windows Explorer" and "Fill in the Missing Pieces"
Of all Windows Vista shortcomings, poor performance and instability are the least forgivable. By now, all new machines (and many older ones) easily meet Vista's requirements—a 1-GHz processor and 1GB RAM—but experience has shown that Vista can underperform on even the hottest hardware. If your 3-GHz quad-core hotrod system takes 20 seconds to open Control Panel, Vista can still be saved with a little sweat and not too many tears.
Yet Another Highway Metaphor
Your PC uses memory the way your car uses the fast lane: The more space you've got, the faster you can go and the less likely you are to crash. If your PC has less than 1GB of RAM and there's room for more, upgrading to at least 2GB is a cheap and effective way to give it the room it needs. Keep in mind, though, that anything more than 4GB is wasted on a PC running 32-bit Vista; you'll need the 64-bit edition—and an x64-compatible processor—to make use of 4GB or more of RAM.
Investigate Those Crashes
Believe it or not, Vista keeps track of every application crash,
blue screen of death, and hung application you close through Task
Manager. Just open the Problem Reports and Solutions page in Control
Panel, and click the Check for new solutions link on the left.
Now don't expect the OS to fix all that many problems by itself; it's
more a learning tool than anything else. When it's done "checking," it
may ask you to send an unspecified amount of information—which may
amount to hundreds of megabytes of log files—to help Microsoft create future solutions. Do it if you've got the time; as the saying goes, it's the only way they'll learn.
But if you want to learn something about what's crashing Vista, click the View problem history link back on the main page to see a list of recently recorded crashes. Right-click any entry and select View solution (if available) to see Microsoft's suggestions, but skip the View problem details entry unless you enjoy reading cryptic 16-bit Hang Signature codes.
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Use the Problem Reports and
Solutions page in Control Panel to research recent application and
driver crashes—and even find solutions to some nagging problems.
But most important, review the Information about other problems
section on the main Problem Reports and Solutions page to see if there
are any software updates that are known to fix recent crashes. Don't be
surprised if you see several update notices for things you've probably
forgotten about, such as third-party video codecs and applications that
aren't normally covered by the Windows Update feature.
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Click "Show problem details" to see
what problems Microsoft is researching in your behalf before you begin
sending hundreds of megabytes of log files.
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Even the Windows Explorer crashes
at the hand of the Green Ribbon of Death are recorded here (although
not in so many words). Right-click any entry to see what Microsoft
knows of the problem.
Continues : http://www.pcmag.com/
