Error Message: “Fatal Error: An error has been encountered that prevents setup from continuing.

Error Message: “Fatal Error: An error has been encountered that prevents setup from continuing. One of the components that Windows needs to continue setup could not be installed. Press OK to view the setup log file.”

This error message means the Setup program is unable to read from your WinXP installation CD.

If your WinXP installation CD is very damaged or scratched, you’ll have to get a replacement from Microsoft. If you’re in the United States, call (800) 360-7561 Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pacific to order a new CD. If you’re in Canada, call (800) 933-4750 during the same days and hours to get a replacement.
You may be able to resolve this by copying the setup files from the CD to a folder in your hard drive. If you’re installing WinXP to a clean hard drive, insert a Win98 or WinMe startup disk in your computer’s floppy drive and reboot the computer. At the command prompt, type the following command:
xcopy [CD Drive Letter]\i386\*.* c:\i386\*.* /s /e

This command copies all the files in the i386 folder of your WinXP installation CD to a new i386 folder in your C: drive. The /s and /e command switches ensure that you copy all directories and subdirectories (even empty ones) to the new location.

Now, type c:\i386\winnt.exe to continue the setup process. Winnt.exe is the installation file that must be used when you’re running.

the Setup program from a startup disk command prompt. If you’re simply upgrading an existing Win98/Me installation, click Start and Run, type cmd in the Open textbox, and click OK. At the command prompt, type the same command as above to copy the files. When the copy process is complete, type c:\i386 \winnt32.exe to launch the setup process. The reason you use the winnt32.exe file in this situation is that you are running the Setup program from within Windows.

Error Message: “STOP: 0x0000000A irql_not_less_or_equal.”

This error message is triggered when you are upgrading your system from Windows 98/Me to WinXP.

Hmmm . . . This one is not very descriptive at all. IRQs (interrupt request lines) are the communication channels via which your hardware devices communicate with your computer’s CPU. When a device needs the CPU’s attention, it uses an interrupt request to let the CPU know that it has data that requires handling. So it’s reasonable to suspect this error message indicates a problem with a hardware device or a device driver.

According to Microsoft, the root cause of this problem is an incompatible hardware device or device driver. To resolve the problem, restart your computer; if the Setup program gives you the option to revert to your previous OS, take it. When your old OS (whether it’s Win98 or WinMe) restarts, uninstall any antivirus and boot manager software and “clean boot” your computer. A clean boot is a simplified boot sequence that prevents device drivers, startup programs, and other settings from loading at boot time.
To clean boot in WinMe, click Start and Run and type msconfig in the Open textbox. Click the General tab and then click the Selective Startup checkbox. Under Selective Startup, click the checkbox to the left of each item to deselect the item. Then, click the Startup tab, find the *StateMgr entry in the list, and click its checkbox to select it. Click OK to accept your changes and click Yes when prompted to restart your computer.
To clean boot in Win98, the steps are fairly similar. To launch the System Configuration Utility in Win98, click Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and System Information. Click Tools and then click System Configuration Utility to launch the application. Click the General tab and deselect every item under Selective Startup by clicking each checkbox. Click OK to accept your changes and then click Yes when you are prompted to restart your system.
After the computer clean boots, attempt the WinXP installation again. If the error still occurs, see the steps below.
If the WinXP Setup program did not give you the option to revert to your previous OS, Microsoft advises that you remove every unnecessary piece of hardware from your system. This includes any hardware device that you absolutely don’t need to run the computer, from USB (Universal Serial Bus) devices to network and sound cards. If the WinXP setup is still unsuccessful, try flashing your BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) to a new version. Consult with your computer’s manufacturer to figure out how to do this.

Mount the ISO File on a Virtual Machine

If you’re testing Ubuntu Server Edition, you can connect the ISO file directly to a virtual
machine. For this book, I installed Hardy Heron in a number of different configurations
on VMware Server Edition. While VMware Server is freely available from www.vmware
.com/download/server/, the source code is not included and therefore is not associated
with an open source license.
For more information on downloading and installing VMware server, see Chapter 20.
For the purpose of this chapter, I assume you have some virtualization system
installed. For those virtualization systems described in Chapter 20, there is some way
to mount the ISO image directly, as if it were a physical CD/DVD. Once configured,
the virtual machine automatically boots the noted ISO file as if it were a CD inserted
in the appropriate drive. For the purpose of this chapter, Figure 2-2 specifies one
example of how an ISO image is configured as a CD on VMware 1.0.x server.

Downloading the ISO File Cooperatively

Many Ubuntu mirror sites support the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, using
BitTorrent- and Jigdo-based P2P tools. If you see files like these,

ubuntu-8.04-server-i386.iso.torrent
ubuntu-8.04-server-i386.iso.jigdo

you can use the contents of these files to download Ubuntu ISO files using the aforementioned
P2P tools. For more information, see www.bittorrent.com and www.debian
.org/CD/jigdo-cd/.

Download the ISO File from the Command Line

The advantage of downloading a large ISO file with certain commands is that such
commands can handle interruptions in the download process. Specifically, the wget
and curl commands can restart a download from the point of an interruption. If these
commands don’t already exist on a local Ubuntu system, they can be installed from
packages of the same name using the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install wget curl

These commands can then be used to download any file, based on a known URL. For
example, if to download the first Ubuntu Server Edition LTS release (6.06), Dapper Drake,
from the Kernel.org server, navigate to http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu-releases/6.06/.
Alternatively, in the Firefox web browser, right-click the desired link, and then click
Copy Link Location from the pop-up menu that appears. Then activate a GUI-based
command line interface and start the command with wget -c and a single quote:

$ wget -c '

Then press CTRL-INSERT to add the copied link to the command, and end the command
with a second single quote, which leads to a result similar to that shown in Figure 2-1.

If an interruption occurs, repeat the command; the download continues from the
point of the interruption. If you want to test this feature, press CTRL-C and run the same
command again. If you’re familiar with the history feature of the command line, all you
need to do to repeat the same command is press the UP ARROW key once to replay the
previous command. If you would rather use the curl command, start the download with
the following command:

$ curl -C - -O '

Then repeat the same process described for the wget command. Don’t forget to end
the command with a second single quote.

Installing Ubuntu Server

Many Linux administrators download the installation program for the latest version of
several Linux distributions, including Ubuntu Server Edition. These downloads correspond
to the contents of the appropriate CD or DVD. In this context, an ISO file is a standard

To download Ubuntu Server Edition from the Ubuntu website or an authorized
mirror site take the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Get Ubuntu website at www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download.
2. As of this writing, the options show Ubuntu 8.04 LTS – Supported to 2013 and
Ubuntu 8.10 – Supported to 2011. These options correspond to the Hardy
Heron and Intrepid Ibex releases, respectively.
3. Under What Type Of Computer Do You Have?, select an architecture. The options
also specify the associated CPUs.
4. Under the “Choose a location near you” option, click the Please Choose A
Location drop-down box. Scroll to a server mirror location geographically
close to you. There are locations available on six continents.
5. Click the Start Download link. The Ubuntu website should take you to another
page, with a message suggesting that the download will begin shortly. The URL
for that page is a long one that starts with www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/
downloading.
6. When the download is ready, accept the option to save the noted ISO file to disk.

step 5 should include a download URL for the ISO file and server. For example, it lists the
following site for Ubuntu downloads at the main Linux kernel servers: http://mirrors
.us.kernel.org/ubuntu-releases/.
The second Ubuntu download site noted also include links for help and suggestions
to help if you encounter trouble during or before the download. Two of the suggestions
are relevant to this section:

▼ Try choosing a different download location. Depending on traffic and the
connection from the target mirror, the geographically closest location might
not be the fastest option.
▲ Try waiting for just a little while. Many download servers have limits on the
number of connections.
Incidentally, these tips also apply when selecting a mirror for package updates, as
discussed in Chapter 8.
Be aware that downloads of large files sometimes don’t work. A power surge, a mistake
on a router, or even a running microwave oven too close to a wireless network can
interrupt and even corrupt a downloaded large file. Every downloaded ISO file can be
verified with an MD5 message digest. For example, to find the MD5 message digest of the
Hardy Heron Ubuntu Server Edition, 32-bit CPU ISO file, run the following command:

$ md5sum ubuntu-8.04.1-server-i386.iso

The output can be verified against the MD5 hash listed at https://help.ubuntu.com/
community/UbuntuHashes. The MD5 hash is often also available in the same server
directories as the ISO files.

15 Effective Tips to Increase Google Adsense CTR

How to make more money with Google Adsense? Get more clicks on ads. We all want to increase Google Adsense CTR i.e. click through ratio, because the higher times the surfer clicks the Adsense ad, higher is the payout to you. So here are 15 effective ways to improve your Adsense CTR.
How to increase Google Adsense CTR?

1. Post Adsense ads them on text rich pages and make sure that Adsense had a bunch of keywords to work with. Getting Higher paying keywords is better of course.
2. Get rid of public service ads, which pay you nothing for your efforts. Here are some ways to avoid getting PSA’s.
3. Avoid titles like the approved ‘Sponsored Links’ and ‘Advertisements’ above the Adsense ads. Why do you want to tell the world they are ads when google already puts ‘Ads by Gooooogle’ with them. These two terms are the only ones allowed by Google TOS. Any other terms will get your account terminated. Remember to avoid these 15 Adsense mistakes.
4. Use section targeting - you can target an ad unit to a specific section of your blog, as well as block out irrelevant sections like navigational links. Useful to get more targeted ads.

Best Google Adsense Link Colors to get higher CTR?

1. Match the colors of your ads with the colour scheme of your site. Blending with your sites color profile helps to identify them not as ads, but as links similar to those of your site. The more the AdSense looks like part of your site, the higher CTR you will get. You can also match the Adsense fonts with your website font design for great results.

2. Blend ads with your page - remove the borders by having a similar color as your background helps to show ads as being part of your site. Do not blend text or the ‘Ads by Gooooogle’ with your background color as it is against Google TOS (Google does not like hidden text!). However, such blending may not work for you always due to banner blindness. Neither do they see the ads, not do they click on them. So sometimes a bold contrasting ad may work better depending on your website design.

3. Experiment by changing the colors, background of advertisements. You have to find out what works best for your site, not others. You can also rotate Adsense colors to reduce ad blindness.

Speed up Windows XP

1. Eliminate programs that run at start-up
Stopping programs from running at start-up is especially daunting because there is no single place you can go to halt them all. Some run because they're in the Startup folder, others because they're part of logon scripts, others because of Registry settings, and so on. But with a little bit of perseverance, you should be able to keep them from running.
Start by cleaning out your Startup folder. Find it in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Start Menu\Programs\Startup, where username is your Windows logon name. Delete the shortcuts of any programs you don't want to run on start-up. As with any shortcuts, when you delete them, you're deleting only the shortcut, not the program itself. (You can also clear out the start-up items by going to Start > Programs > Startup, then right-clicking items you want to remove.)

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Next, clean out your Scheduled Tasks folder. Go to C:\Windows\Tasks, and delete the shortcuts of any programs that you don't want to run automatically on a schedule.

Note: You can bypass all the programs in your Startup folder on an as-needed basis. To stop XP from loading any programs in the Startup folder, hold down the Shift key during bootup. No programs in the Startup folder will run, but the items will still remain there so that they will start up as they would normally the next time you boot.

2. Speed up shutdown times
speed up; you can also make sure that your system shuts down faster. If shutting down XP takes what seems to be an inordinate amount of time, here are a couple of steps you can take to speed up the shutdown process:
Don't have XP clear your paging file at shutdown. For security reasons, you can have XP clear your paging file (pagefile.sys) of its contents whenever you shut down. Your paging file is used to store temporary files and data, but when your system shuts down, information stays in the file. Some people prefer to have the paging file cleared at shutdown because sensitive information such as unencrypted passwords sometimes ends up in the file. However, clearing the paging file can slow shutdown times significantly, so if extreme security isn't a high priority, you might not want to clear it. To shut down XP without clearing your paging file, run the Registry Editor (click Start > Run, then type regedit in the Run box) and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Change the value of ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 0. Close the Registry, and restart your computer. Whenever you turn off XP from now on, the paging file won't be cleared, and you should be able to shut down more quickly.

3. Disable services that run at start-up
Constantly running in the background of XP are services--processes that help the operating system run or that provide support to applications. Many of these services launch automatically at start-up. While you need many of them, some are not required, and they can slow down your system when they run in the background.

You can disable services at start-up by using the system configuration utility, similar to the way that you halt programs from running at start-up, except that you use the Services tab instead of the Startup tab. But the system configuration utility doesn't necessarily list every service that launches on start-up. A bigger problem is that disabling services is more of shot in the dark than disabling programs. When you disable a program, you can get a sense of what the program does. But when you disable a service through the system configuration utility, there's often no way to know what it does.
A better way of disabling services at start-up is via the Services computer-management console. Run it by typing services.msc at the command prompt. The Services computer-management console includes a description of all services so that you can know ahead of time whether a particular service is one you want to turn off. It also lets you pause the service so that you can test your machine and see whether that service is needed.

After you run the console, click the Extended tab. This view will show you a description of each service in the left pane when you highlight the service. The Startup Type column shows you which services launch on start-up--any with Automatic in that field. Click that column to sort together all the services that automatically launch on start-up. Then highlight each of those services and read the descriptions.

When you find a service you want to disable, right-click it and choose Properties. In the Properties dialog box that appears, choose Manual from the Startup Type drop-down list. The service won't start automatically from now on, but you can start it manually via the console. If you want the service disabled so that it can't be run, choose Disabled. To test the results, turn off any services that you don't want to run by clicking Stop The Service in the left pane, or by right-clicking the service and choosing Stop