Choosing the Right Data Recovery Company If Your Hard Disk Fails

Choosing the Right Data Recovery Company If Your Hard Disk Fails

by NEW SHAFA

Let’s face it. Life’s full of ups and downs. It’s full of uncertainties. Just like your precious data. If anything, data stability is not permanent. In fact, more often than not, data drives tend to crash and burn and leave you in the lurch when you least expect it.
As we know, data is delicate and is subject to loss due to many reasons. The most common reasons for data drive failure are a virus, a poorly ventilated casing, actual component failure, damage to your hard drive, a hard disk crash or a power surge. It’s highly possible that your data can be lost for any of these reasons. The best way to avoid getting hurt by data loss is to regularly back-up your data. You can schedule a fixed time for this every day or at fixed regular intervals. There is a lot of software out there that allows you to do this automatically. Make sure you backup data or else you will end up needing the services of a hard disk data recovery software or a company that specializes in HDD data recovery if simple solutions fail to recover your drive’s data.

Now, just in case you have somehow managed to have a serious hard disk failure, and need to call a data recovery company, here are some pointers to help you along the way. First and foremost, make sure you call in a data recovery company that is well known and known to specialize in data recovery. Make sure that it is not an additional service that they provide along with many others. When you call them in, make sure that they provide a no-fix no-charge policy. This means that they will not be able to charge you unless they can recover your data partially or completely, and is a very fair system of quoting for recovering your data.

Just a no-fix no-fee policy is not enough. Make sure you get a fixed quote in writing clearly outlining different slabs of data retrieval and the charges for the same. You should know exactly what you are getting into before they begin recovering your data. Also, make sure that the company has a clean room and qualified technicians who are capable of handling your drive without causing further damage to your data.

And yes. Never believe anyone who promises you the whole world. In fact, don’t believe any company who promises great results. There’s no such thing. When you are facing data loss, you have to face the bitter truth that your data is lost forever before you call in the data recovery company. The sooner you accept this the better. This is why you should never believe any company who claims they can recover your data for sure, as it is but a slim possibility in the first place.

Keep these basic rules in mind, and you will be able to find the right data recovery company to help you get your data back.

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Online accounting system Versus Window accounting software

Online accounting system Versus Window accounting software

by KOK CHOON KOW

While conventional window accounting software has dominated computing world for the last 20 years, online accounting system has be spreading rapidly with the introduction of ASP (Application Service Provider) or SaaS (Software as a service).


The best part of SaaS is the cross-platform and information availability anytime anywhere. To ease of deployment and maintenance has drive online accounting to spread very fast, with the introduction of Web 2.0 even bring this further.


The biggest challenge of all time for SaaS will be security and privacy concern. Conventional customer has been used to stored and backup their data by themselves. To convince / introduce online accounting will post the question of data security. To provide such promise and reduce the customer risk of data lost, vendor must provides some backup mechanism and allow customer to download their own backup data. If online accounting vendor can provides such mechanism, we can see the domination of online accounting system (or SaaS) in the next 10 years.


The biggest advantages for SaaS compared to conventional software is the Rental business modal; Instead of owning the software, the user now rent the software as service, enjoying the newest feature at all time while maintaining the lowest cost of ownership. Online vendor must have a very targeted and flexible plan for pricing strategy, as there is a breakeven point where company will buy the system rather than rent it when they have lots of user!


Conventional accounting system must prepare to migrate to SaaS model before online vendor started to solve and convince the user about security and backup risk.

Cynics Software

Get Files From RAR and ZIP Instantly Without Decompression

Get Files From RAR and ZIP Instantly Without Decompression

by KING THOMAS

The latest version of WinMount lets you mount not only ISO images, but also ZIP and RAR archives on virtual drives and get their content without decompression
SUZHOU, P.R. China - August 23, 2007 - WinMount International, Inc. today announces the immediate availability of WinMount 2.0, the new edition of its optical disk emulation software, letting users mount images on virtual CD / DVD drive and play them without the need for physical disks. Unique to WinMount is an additional feature that allows you to mount ZIP or RAR archives and get files from them instantly without decompression.

Similar to most popular CD emulators, WinMount supports a large choice of image formats, such as ISO, CUE/BIN, CCD,BWT, MDS, CDI, NRG, PDI B5T, ISZ, but what makes it really stand out is an ability to mount ZIP and RAR archives and get their content instantly without decompression. The decompression task can be very daunting especially if you need to unpack a large archive. For example, a 1 GB installation package of a game takes about 10 minutes to unpack. But with WinMount in place, you can access the content of the archive instantly after you have mounted it, which is a snap. Simply right-click on the archive, select "Mount to a new drive" from the popup menu, and in a second you can get files in the archive directly without any unpacking hassle. The program can mount solid and multi-volume archives, and for RAR files, it uses its proprietary dynamic decompression technology.

Some other important benefits of WinMount

The best in having a CD / DVD emulator like WinMount is that you don't have to be a prisoner to your CD-ROM that can play only one disk at a time. With Winmount, you can play two, three or more disks simultaneously without the hassle of ejecting and reloading them one after another. Simply create images and mount them on virtual drives with WinMount. Because these images are launched from the hard drive, they run faster than physical disks.

Another good thing about WinMount is safety of data. People who have expensive disks can create their images and store them safely on the hard drive for life whereas physical disks may become useless and inaccessible after catching a slight scratch.

Enhancements to new WinMount 2.0

The new edition of WinMount comes with a number of refinements, including an original dynamic decompression technique in dealing with RAR, a brand new core and friendlier interface. Some minor bugs found in earlier releases have been fixed too. According to Thomas King, manager at WinMount International, WinMount is becoming increasingly popular and customer requests are driving its authors to include new features. In the nearest future, the company is planning to add support for mounting HTTP, FTP, Ghost disk image files, VMWare images, mounting Inno setup and Install Shield archive files.

Pricing and Availability

WinMount 2.0 runs under Windows NT, 2000, 2003, XP, Vista and costs $39 (USD) for a single user license. Registered users are entitled to free upgrades for the life of the product, free technical support by email or via WinMount Support Sites worldwide. Additional information on the product, as well as its free evaluation copy is available from www.winmount.com.

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NOTE TO EDITORS: Please, let us know if you have any questions or would like any additional information on WinMount 2.0. Contact Thomas King at king@winmount.com for more information. A free registration key is available upon request to all editors considering a review.

Product page link: http://www.winmount.com Download link: http://www.winmount.com/down/WinMount_setup.exe (2227 Kb) Company website: http://www.winmount.com E-mail: king@winmount.com

Deciding whether to trick

Deciding whether to trick

by SERDAR AKTAS

Should you use the tricks in this chapter, and if not, why not? You’ll hear several reasons for not using tricks. The first I’m not going to belabor, because I’m not sure the argument behind this reason is very strong: ethics. You’ll hear from many people that the tricks in this chapter are unethical, that those who use them are cheating and one step on the evolutionary ladder above pond scum (or one step below pond scum, depending on the commentator). Self-righteousness is in ample supply on the Internet. Maybe these people are right, maybe not. I do know that many people who try such tricks also have great reasons for doing so and are not the Internet’s equivalent of Pol Pot or Attila the Hun. They’re simply trying to put their best foot forward in a difficult technical environment. Many people have tried search engine tricks because they’ve invested a lot of money in Web sites that turn out to be invisible to the search engines. These folks can’t afford to abandon their sites and start again. (See Chapter 7 for a discussion of why search engines sometimes can’t read Web pages.) You can, rightly so, point out that these folks can deal with the problem in other ways, but that just means the people involved are misinformed, not evil. The argument made by these tricksters might go something like this: Who gave the search engines the right to set the rules, anyway? One could argue that doing pretty much anything beyond the basics is cheating. After all, smart Webmasters armed with a little knowledge can make the sorts of adjustments discussed elsewhere in this book, pushing their Web sites up in the ranks above sites that are more appropriate for a particular keyword phrase yet are owned by folks with less knowledge. Ethics aside, the really good reason for avoiding egregious trickery is that it may have the opposite effect and harm your search engine position. And a corollary to that reason is that other, legitimate ways exist to get a good search engine ranking. (Unfortunately, these are often more complicated and time-consuming.)
author site: www.more-tech.com

Learn Excel - Where Is Excel® Used?

Learn Excel - Where Is Excel® Used?

by VIDEO PROFESSOR

Whether you work at an accounting firm, a marketing company, an auto dealership, a school attendance office, a manufacturing plant’s human resources department, or an office associated with city, county, state or federal government, chances are, you’ll be called upon to use and learn Excel.
Just about every workplace has a demand for Excel, the computing world’s most commonly used software program for comparative data analysis. Excel has been available in various incarnations for more than a decade. Each subsequent release takes the program to new territory.

Popularly known as the best spreadsheet program on the market, Excel is powerful, easy to use, and remarkably efficient. Excel is highly interactive. Its spreadsheet cells are arranged in a collection of rows and columns, each of which can hold a number, a text string, or a formula that performs a function, such as calculation. It’s easy to copy and move cells as well as modify formulas. The spreadsheet is displayed on the computer screen in a scrollable window that allows the document to be as deep or as wide as required.

Working for a major newspaper in Northern California, I was one of several reporters involved in the annual evaluation of our county’s economy. The job involved collecting data that would be punched into Excel spreadsheets that ultimately ranked information according to the category of statistics being reviewed.

The beauty of Excel, from the standpoint of newspaper research projects, is that you can use formulas to recalculate results by changing any of the cells they use. With this model, you can use the same spreadsheet data to achieve various results by simply defining and changing formulas as desired. It is this feature that makes Excel so useful in so many different arenas.

With a click of the mouse, we reporters were able to get answers to a wide variety of questions. Which employers had the greatest number of workers? Which ones had the highest amount of gross annual receipts? Which ones appeared to be growing and which ones had declining sales? What was the volume of real estate loans and had there been a decline or increase from the previous year?

We looked at local and national retail, services, financial institutions, government entities, agriculture, the wine industry, tourism and hospitality, manufacturing, residential and commercial real estate, everything imaginable.

Excel allowed us to examine ratios, percentages, and anything else we wanted to scrutinize. Finally, we were able to use Excel to compare the results to data from previous years.

Since reporters tend to be former English majors, most of those who worked on this annual project were more familiar with Microsoft® Word than any other software program. Therefore, most were required to undergo Excel training. For some, learning Excel was easier than for others. A few relied on guides such as Microsoft Excel Bible or Excel for Dummies. Some reporters underwent an Excel tutorial while others learned by doing.

Not only were the Excel spreadsheets crucial to the research, the format of each was published in the newspaper. Here is where some additional Excel functions came into play. Editors were able to make the spreadsheets more visually appealing by using colors and shading, borders and lines, and other features that made the spreadsheets easy for readers to decipher.

Wearing another of my several hats in the newsroom, I often wrote articles concerning the local job market. I found proficiency in Excel was a requirement for a wide variety of employment positions and that area recruiting firms offered their clients opportunities to take free or low-cost Excel tutorials in preparation for the workplace. Most employers expect job candidates to already know the software that the work will require and don’t want to have to train new hires.

Don’t kid yourself. If you’re seeking any kind of office work, you’ll need to know not only Microsoft Word but also Excel.

Excel and Microsoft are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation, registered in the U.S. and other countries.

About Video Professor: Video Professor is the industry leader in self-paced computer software tutorials. Since 1987, the core of Video Professor's learning initiative has been to provide home users as well as corporate professionals with valuable and user-friendly learning solutions for today's most common software titles. Tutorials are offered on CD-ROM and through Video Professor Online, an Internet-based program.

About the Author: Sheri Graves is an award-winning writer who freelances from her home in Santa Rosa, California.

What makes a good requirement?

What makes a good requirement?

by LYNDON HARDY

What Makes a Good Requirement?
Most project teams know the importance of gathering requirements -- what the project is to accomplish -- and analyzing them before starting out. A good set of requirements is the foundation upon which a successful project is built. Ill-formed requirements lead to misunderstandings, rework, and, potentially, total project failure. But what is a “good” requirement? Certainly, like all the other elements of project documentation, it must be clear and succinct. But in addition, a good requirement is testable, assignable, and cost-effective.

Testable
We all probably have been on projects with requirements that read something like “The product shall be easy to use.” Ease of use is desirable to be sure. And if the final product is not, the project team will certainly hear about it. But stating this desire as a requirement gives no real guidance on how to proceed. During the course of design and construction there is no objective way of measuring how well the team is satisfying it. It is just verbiage that gets in the way and creates expectations that might not be realized. If a requirement is not testable, it is not a requirement. It has to be fixed. It is as simple as that. If you encounter an untestable requirement during requirement analysis, you can fix it in one of two ways. First, you can rework it so that it does become testable. Useability requirements are particularly hard in this regard of course, but even something like “Eighty percent of a test group shall rate ease of use at least a 4 on a scale of 1 to 5” is superior to “The product shall be easy to use”. The reworking does not guarantee a great design but it is something that the project team can work towards during development, testing, and user acceptance. The second way to handle an untestable requirement is to move it to the goals or objectives section of the requirement document. You do not want to get rid of the desire all together so the thought does need a home --- but not as a requirement.

Assignable
Eventually the final product of the project is tested against the list of (hopefully) testable requirements. Often it is discovered that not only do some requirements fail because of flaws but also because, oops, the functionality was just never implemented. Good practice, of course, is to ensure that each and every requirement is assigned to an element of the design. This can be a multi-step process in which requirements are first assigned to the top-level elements. Then within each element they are further assigned to sub-elements, continuing down to the purview of the single individual responsible for a portion of the design or implementation. A rigorous application of assignment helps ensure that no requirement is forgotten. But even with rigorous assignment, requirements can still “fall between the cracks”. One of the main reasons this happens is that some requirements, as written, are applicable at a high level and no designer ownership is ever assigned.

For example for a software project, “The response time from pressing the Enter key until the screen updates shall be less than one second” is a testable requirement. The problem is that the delay consists of input verification on a client computer, network messaging, application server processing, network messaging again, and finally client presentation. Each of these pieces of the design might be the responsibility of a different individual. There is no ownership of the requirement. The solution to this problem is to create what are called derived requirements. Derived requirements are children of a parent requirement. If all of them are satisfied than the parent requirement is satisfied as well. In the example, the derived requirements could be “Input verification shall be less than .1 second” and so on for the rest with the total for all of the pieces summing to 1 second. Specifying the allocated delays is a hard problem. A project team often can only guess. But by doing so, requirements can be assigned to individual elements. Every designer knows his responsibility. During testing the allocated times can be shifted as needed. The key point is that no requirement falls between the cracks.

Cost-Effective
Not all requirements are created equal. Some are easy to implement, such as “Name, street, city, zip, and state shall be displayed”. Others are complex, hard to implement and hard to test, such as “When the system loading exceeds 80%, the backup process shall be initiated which copies all in-memory records to disk”. Although it is impossible to do this in reality, consider the thought experiment in which you assigned the actual project cost to design, develop, and test every single requirement. Now sort these costs from the least to the most expensive and sum them up, that is, create a graph of the cost of satisfying one requirement, then two, then three, and so on up until all of the requirements are satisfied, including the most costly ones. The curve you get would start off slowly and then grow increasingly sharper as you progress to more and more expensive requirements. Most of the requirements are satisfied reasonably.

A few, however, contribute a disproportionate amount to overall project cost. A cost-effective project only implements requirements up to where the curve begins to rise sharply. In real life we do not have such a quantitative curve, but usually we do have a gut feel for which the hard requirements are. You can do one of three things with these requirements. First, review just how important they are. They indeed might not be worth the cost. Second, move them to goals or objectives. Keep them around but not as requirements. Third, prototype them before beginning the major development effort. Often prototyping provides design insights that greatly reduce the final costs. Testable, assignable, cost-effective -- hallmarks of a good requirement. Checking for them is an essential part of requirement analysis.

About the Author Lyndon Hardy is the president of Alodar Systems, Inc., a software consultancy that provides the aspirin for the growing pains of small and medium businesses. To read more tips visit
Alodar Systems and click on solutions in the menu bar.

Email: hardy@alodar.com

Baby Monitors : Which one is Right for You?

Baby Monitors : Which one is Right for You?

by DENNIS JAYLON

Baby monitors are of great help to mothers with newborns and infant babies to take care of. With the help of this device, mothers can take care of their babies as well as manage other chores with consummate ease. She also does not need to keep fretting regarding her baby's well being when she is not around him.
Baby monitors are available in a variety of designs having several features. It is extremely important to choose the right baby monitor that is appropriate for your home and your baby. Here are some features available in baby monitors. Mothers can choose the one that suits their needs the best.

Baby monitors are available in one way and two way systems. In a one way system, you can hear your baby; but in a two way one your baby can hear you as well. Video baby monitors are also available having a small screen, where the mother can see her baby, irrespective of where she is around the house.

Every baby monitors has a limited range, outside which they cannot receive the signals, hence they become non-functional. While buying baby monitors, mothers need to take into account the size of the house, or the maximum range within which they could be away from their babies. The size of the house is one thing that needs to be kept in mind while purchasing baby monitors. A small home may suffice with one that has less range, while a bigger home will certainly require one with more range. Some baby monitors have difficulty in transmitting signals through thick concrete walls. Hence, this factor should also be borne in mind while buying one.

Portability is a necessary feature in baby monitors. It is advisable to go for lightweight models that are easy to carry around, and probably equipped with a clip to attach the receiver to your clothes and belts. These days, baby monitors come with more than one channel to deal with transmission problems and interruptions, which may be caused due to the use of mobile and cordless phones at home or even in the neighbourhood.

Choosing the right baby monitor depends upon a lot of factors, like the size of the house, the locality where you live and the duration for which you might be away from your baby. Once you have realised these factors, it will become very easy to buy the appropriate baby monitor.

How to get started using Microsoft Visio

How to get started using Microsoft Visio

by JONATHAN BLOCKER

If it is the end of a quarter, that typically means that it is time for you to produce various reports if you work at or own a company. If you are a department head or in charge of a business project, then reports are crucial to help you make important decisions regarding system optimization, streamlining of business processes, as well as project tracking and the related record keeping to ensure that your project is moving forward in a productive manner.
However, if you have been in business for any length of time, you know that that amount of time you have at work is limited, and many people do not take the time to read information-dense reports as thoroughly as they should. One way to improve the readability of your business reports, documents and presentations is to incorporate Microsoft Visio into your arsenal of tools for document preparation. You will find that there are several easy ways for a visio developer to get started using visio software, so that your reports will contain easy-to-understand flowcharts, diagrams, models, charts and shapes for improved communication of your important ideas.

If you search the Microsoft Office Visio website, you will discover that you can take a Visio tutorial to help you get up and running quickly. There are many online tutorials that you can fit into your schedule at your convenience. You can learn the basics about positioning shapes on your Visio template, or adding text to your diagrams. You will discover the secrets to connecting the shapes in a Visio template. One really handy feature of Visio 2007 is its capability to link up to information stored in Excel files, for instance, so all of the numerical data can be transformed into a graphic representation of the information. There are courses that will teach you how to link up data to the diagrams you create using Visio. You will also discover tutorials that give you ideas for using Visio pictures in your business documents and presentations, and tips for customizing frequently used menus and toolbars.

In addition to the many fine Microsoft Visio tutorials available, there are also excellent Visio demonstrations that are ready for you to see on your office computer with Internet access. If you learn best by seeing how something is done, then a demonstration could easily be the best way for you to learn about Visio and how it can help you at work. There are demos that show you how to connect information from other Office programs, such as Excel, to your Visio template. You can learn how to create the ever-popular flow chart via a Visio demonstration. Visio 2007 has a thematic capability that unifies all of the documentation you produce, and you can see how it works on a Visio demo.

Your reports, documents and presentations will reach a new level of excellence and professionalism when you apply the tools offered by Visio to them.


As a business executive, Jonathon Blocker has had a great deal of experience with a variety of software. When it comes to documents and presentations he has come to rely on Micrcosoft Visio. He has found that Visio can be used effectively for flowcharts, diagrams, models and charts. For most business applications, a visio developer can be trained and get started using Visio software in short amount of time.