Many of us are so used to working on a computer desktop that when it comes time to purchase a new computer, we don't consider other options. Today, computer notebooks - which were once called laptops - offer a number of advantages over a computer desktop. Here are just five reasons why you should take a second look at notebooks.
1. Mobility
You might be used to pulling up a chair to your computer, but it makes much more sense to pull your computer up to your chair. Laptops can certainly be used at your desk, but you also have the option of bringing them to the spot where you're most comfortable. Maybe you'd like to surf the Web in the evening out in the living room or catch up on your favorite blogs before bedtime. Notebooks with wireless connectivity can travel with you throughout your home, so you can check your email or do your Internet shopping anywhere.
Of course, notebooks also make sense for those who are on the go. Students can take laptops to class and to the library, while businesspeople can take them along while traveling. With WiFi so widely available, it even makes sense to have a notebook while on vacation. With the right notebook, it's easy to take photos with your digital camera, upload them, and email them to friends and family before you even get back home. Or you can use it to write a vacation blog and include those pictures from your digital camera.
2. Better Displays
The size and quality of computer notebook displays has improved so dramatically that there's little difference between laptops and a computer desktop. For example, you can get Apple's MacBook with a 13.3-inch LCD widescreen (1280 x 800 pixels), a 15.4-inch LCD widescreen (1440 x 900 pixels) or a 17-inch widescreen (1680 x 1050 pixels). Similarly, the Compaq Presario has a 15.4-inch display.
3. Lighter Weight
Just a few years ago, even the lightest notebook was a pain to lug around. Today, though, laptops are increasingly easy on the back. The MacBook is slightly over an inch thick and the Toshiba Portege weighs in at about four pounds. While that's still heavy compared to come of the new ultralight convertibles (Fujitsu's LifeBook U810 weighs only a pound and half), it's a significant improvement over the old seven-pound laptops.
4. Better Computing and Battery Power
Historically, two drawbacks of notebooks were their limited RAM, limited space on the hard drive, and short battery life. Times have changed, though, and laptops now have as much power under the hood as their computer desktop cousins. The MacBook, for example, has 1GB of memory (configurable up to 4 GB) and a hard drive that's configurable to 250GB. This means that your software will hum right along and you'll be able to zip through programs as quickly and as easily as you do on your desktop. Likewise, batteries in today's notebooks don't heat up and don't conk out.
5. More Features
In older laptops, the computer's size and weight limited the number and types of features available. Today, with smaller processors and other components, there's room to pack more features into notebooks. For example, the MacBook has a DVD player, built-in webcam, built-in wireless capability, two USB ports and a FireWire port, built-in microphone, and audio and digital input/output.
There are so many advantages to owning notebooks that, before you buy your next computer, it's worth your while to take one for a spin.
Showing posts with label dvd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dvd. Show all posts
Friday, January 9, 2009
Sunday, January 4, 2009
CD/DVD Burners
Some people think with the standardization of DVD burners on new computer systems, CD burners have become obsolete. Most people with CD burners will tend to disagree, as do I.
Before going out and purchasing a CD Burner or DVD Burner the requirements of the individual need to be determined allowing the best choice to be selected.
A DVD Burner is used for copying or duplicating a DVD disc or to burn video files into DVD Format so they can be played on a home DVD player. DVD discs allow Gigabytes of Data to be burned to the disc, in some cases a whole hard drive of data, making a tempting choice to use as a data back-up tool.
We need to remember that to be able to read the DVD, a DVD ROM is required. If you are in an office environment and need to use the disc on multiple computers then this may cause an issue as most computers in an office don’t come installed with a DVD-ROM – if they do then it’s a waste of money on the IT departments part.
Although CD Burners are somewhat slower than today’s DVD burners they do have more pros than con’s when comparing to a DVD Burner for data back-ups. Blank media Discs for CD Burners are either 650MB or 700MB in size, yes a lot smaller than that of a DVD disc.
CD-R discs can either hold data or audio and can be read in almost any CD-ROM and if the CD-R is made into an audio disc then its possible to read the disc in a Hi-Fi or a car CD Player – you will need to make sure the drive has the ability to read CD-R media, most newer models of CD-Players are compatible to read CD-R media.
DVD burners only have the advantage of size of CD burners. Now that DVD burners are becoming more and more popular, the prices of CD burners and media are dropping dramatically making them a very cost effective purchase.
Before going out and purchasing a CD Burner or DVD Burner the requirements of the individual need to be determined allowing the best choice to be selected.
A DVD Burner is used for copying or duplicating a DVD disc or to burn video files into DVD Format so they can be played on a home DVD player. DVD discs allow Gigabytes of Data to be burned to the disc, in some cases a whole hard drive of data, making a tempting choice to use as a data back-up tool.
We need to remember that to be able to read the DVD, a DVD ROM is required. If you are in an office environment and need to use the disc on multiple computers then this may cause an issue as most computers in an office don’t come installed with a DVD-ROM – if they do then it’s a waste of money on the IT departments part.
Although CD Burners are somewhat slower than today’s DVD burners they do have more pros than con’s when comparing to a DVD Burner for data back-ups. Blank media Discs for CD Burners are either 650MB or 700MB in size, yes a lot smaller than that of a DVD disc.
CD-R discs can either hold data or audio and can be read in almost any CD-ROM and if the CD-R is made into an audio disc then its possible to read the disc in a Hi-Fi or a car CD Player – you will need to make sure the drive has the ability to read CD-R media, most newer models of CD-Players are compatible to read CD-R media.
DVD burners only have the advantage of size of CD burners. Now that DVD burners are becoming more and more popular, the prices of CD burners and media are dropping dramatically making them a very cost effective purchase.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Search and Recover Lost Microsoft Word Documents
If you type a lot and are using Microsoft Word as your text processor, you've made the right choice. Microsoft Word is arguably the most powerful, feature-rich and handy to use by complete beginners and advanced professionals altogether. It has unparalleled strengths in creating, formatting and modifying all types of documents, from simple memos to complex reports. When you save a document in one version of Microsoft Word, it can usually be opened in a different version without problems.
But what if the document you've spent so much time on just disappears? What can happen to it? First and most possible, you can simply delete it yourself by an accident. You might think that this would never happen to you because there is the Windows Recycle Bin, and even if it's accidentally emptied, you'll just go to the Internet and get a free undelete utility. Well, it does not work this way...
Here's what happened to my wife a couple of weeks ago. She was working on a chapter for her Ph.D. thesis, and sent it to a professor for review. Usually, she gets back a document with embedded comments by email. She saves an attachment from the email, overwriting the old one, and deletes it from her Hotmail account. But this time, things went the wrong way. She received her chapter by email and replaced the old document with the new one, only to find out that her supervisor got a copy of the old one! She opened the Recycle Bin and found out that the document was never deleted but instead, it was replaced, so it wasn't even in the Recycle Bin. She tried to find an email that she had sent earlier, but Hotmail does not store sent messages. She asked me to do something to recover the document, and I downloaded a couple of free undelete programs, only to find that there were several dozens of deleted documents with that same name. So, I failed to recover the most recent revisions.
This story did have a happy ending, as my wife's supervisor discovered the latest version of the document on her computer. But one thing that I learned from this story was never to rely on the Recycle Bin and free data recovery tools. To prevent this kind of things from happening, I decided to look for commercial alternatives.
I quickly discovered that there are many data recovery offers on the market. Most products mention recovering deleted or corrupted files and documents, and some tools promise recovery of files even from crashed or damaged hard drives. There are basically two types of data recovery products. They are different in how they find the lost files, and what they do to recover them. Simpler products, such as those free undelete utilities that I tried in my quest, deal with the file system. They simply scan the file system looking for records of files that are marked "deleted", and clear the mark. This is a fast and easy way to recover lost files, and it works sometimes, especially if you deleted a file just a minute ago.
These products, as I discovered from my own experience, fail to do their job if you have a complex case or if you are recovering a failed hard drive, or if the file system is damaged. If your document has been deleted some time ago or overwritten with another file, chances of successful recovery using these tools are slim.
The other type of products deals with your hard drive directly instead of scanning the file system, but such products are slow and expensive. I also found them extremely complex to use because they don't show the names of the deleted documents, let alone their content. These tools don't have access to the file system, and are unaware of the files' names, showing documents as "document_001.doc" at best, but more likely you'll see something like "~ocume1" instead of a proper name.
Then I found DiskInternals Word Recovery. It does an amazing thing by combining the best of the other data recovery products, while offering unprecedented efficiency dealing specifically with Microsoft Word documents such as .DOC and .RTF. It scans the file system and learns about the files that were deleted the way the free undelete tools do. Then, it goes further and scans the hard drive directly to locate Microsoft Word documents that are not shown in the file system. It uses a list of file signatures to detect the beginning and end of Microsoft Word documents, and extracts their contents and metadata on the fly. This method is said to work even if your hard drive is half dead!
DiskInternals Word Recovery synchronizes the results obtained with the file system scan with the results obtained by accessing the hard disk directly, presenting the most complete list of recoverable Word documents along with their file names, metadata and contents, and yields the best ratio of recoverability.
If I wanted to get the latest version of any Word document, I would simply use "On the Fly" filters that allow to only display files with specific title, written by specific author, or the files that contain certain text, are of a certain size, or are last saved on a specific date. The free version of DiskInternals Word Recovery allows full file preview to ensure you recover exactly what you want, and that you can recover the document in full with no garbage or missing parts.
DiskInternals Word Recovery if not free, but I for one am done with the free recovery tools. You can download and try an evaluation version for free from http://www.diskinternals.com/ , and only purchase if you see that DiskInternals Word Recovery does indeed deliver what others just offer: the complete recovery of your lost Microsoft Word documents.
But what if the document you've spent so much time on just disappears? What can happen to it? First and most possible, you can simply delete it yourself by an accident. You might think that this would never happen to you because there is the Windows Recycle Bin, and even if it's accidentally emptied, you'll just go to the Internet and get a free undelete utility. Well, it does not work this way...
Here's what happened to my wife a couple of weeks ago. She was working on a chapter for her Ph.D. thesis, and sent it to a professor for review. Usually, she gets back a document with embedded comments by email. She saves an attachment from the email, overwriting the old one, and deletes it from her Hotmail account. But this time, things went the wrong way. She received her chapter by email and replaced the old document with the new one, only to find out that her supervisor got a copy of the old one! She opened the Recycle Bin and found out that the document was never deleted but instead, it was replaced, so it wasn't even in the Recycle Bin. She tried to find an email that she had sent earlier, but Hotmail does not store sent messages. She asked me to do something to recover the document, and I downloaded a couple of free undelete programs, only to find that there were several dozens of deleted documents with that same name. So, I failed to recover the most recent revisions.
This story did have a happy ending, as my wife's supervisor discovered the latest version of the document on her computer. But one thing that I learned from this story was never to rely on the Recycle Bin and free data recovery tools. To prevent this kind of things from happening, I decided to look for commercial alternatives.
I quickly discovered that there are many data recovery offers on the market. Most products mention recovering deleted or corrupted files and documents, and some tools promise recovery of files even from crashed or damaged hard drives. There are basically two types of data recovery products. They are different in how they find the lost files, and what they do to recover them. Simpler products, such as those free undelete utilities that I tried in my quest, deal with the file system. They simply scan the file system looking for records of files that are marked "deleted", and clear the mark. This is a fast and easy way to recover lost files, and it works sometimes, especially if you deleted a file just a minute ago.
These products, as I discovered from my own experience, fail to do their job if you have a complex case or if you are recovering a failed hard drive, or if the file system is damaged. If your document has been deleted some time ago or overwritten with another file, chances of successful recovery using these tools are slim.
The other type of products deals with your hard drive directly instead of scanning the file system, but such products are slow and expensive. I also found them extremely complex to use because they don't show the names of the deleted documents, let alone their content. These tools don't have access to the file system, and are unaware of the files' names, showing documents as "document_001.doc" at best, but more likely you'll see something like "~ocume1" instead of a proper name.
Then I found DiskInternals Word Recovery. It does an amazing thing by combining the best of the other data recovery products, while offering unprecedented efficiency dealing specifically with Microsoft Word documents such as .DOC and .RTF. It scans the file system and learns about the files that were deleted the way the free undelete tools do. Then, it goes further and scans the hard drive directly to locate Microsoft Word documents that are not shown in the file system. It uses a list of file signatures to detect the beginning and end of Microsoft Word documents, and extracts their contents and metadata on the fly. This method is said to work even if your hard drive is half dead!
DiskInternals Word Recovery synchronizes the results obtained with the file system scan with the results obtained by accessing the hard disk directly, presenting the most complete list of recoverable Word documents along with their file names, metadata and contents, and yields the best ratio of recoverability.
If I wanted to get the latest version of any Word document, I would simply use "On the Fly" filters that allow to only display files with specific title, written by specific author, or the files that contain certain text, are of a certain size, or are last saved on a specific date. The free version of DiskInternals Word Recovery allows full file preview to ensure you recover exactly what you want, and that you can recover the document in full with no garbage or missing parts.
DiskInternals Word Recovery if not free, but I for one am done with the free recovery tools. You can download and try an evaluation version for free from http://www.diskinternals.com/ , and only purchase if you see that DiskInternals Word Recovery does indeed deliver what others just offer: the complete recovery of your lost Microsoft Word documents.
Repairing a damaged CD
Why compact discs get damaged. Compact discs are all plastic. Compact discs are even not sensitive to magnetic fields as in case floppy disks, which never used to retain data when even a slight magnetic field is crossed with floppies. Then what is the reason why CDs get corrupted?
CDs work on the principle of reflection of light. CD drives have a built in laser that is used to read data. When laser is focused on to the CD the beam get reflected to a point when there is some data on that are i.e. 0 or 1 the points where light beam lands back is different which symbolizes the bit value.
When something on the CD breaks the path of the laser light, something like dust particle or something else like a FINGER PRINT!!!. Finger prints are nothing but natural oil from skin that sticks to the surface in contact with the skin in a pattern of skin cells. This oil or say fingerprint helps in refraction of light and loss of data to the reading source i.e. laser.
When CDs don't run the reason is because something is interrupting the laser to read the shinny side of the CD. But I have important data what should I do now?
Most of the times it is because of dust or fingerprints, you need to clean the CD.
You can clean your CDs with plain water or a bit soapy water. And it is better to clean the CDs after some time. But this doesn't mean you should start putting your CDs in dishwasher or washing machine every week.
All you need to do is to wipe the shinny side of the CD with a clean moist cloth and try running it again make sure the CD is dry before you run it.
People say about using all different sorts of things to clean CDs like toothpastes, wax polish etc. but I would recommend you to buy some CD cleaning kit. But if you still want to go try, do let me know the results.
And one thing I must add is that DVD work on the same principle and are bit more sensitive to dust and fingerprints. You can also use the above mentioned procedure for DVDs. But you need to be careful with DVDs
CDs work on the principle of reflection of light. CD drives have a built in laser that is used to read data. When laser is focused on to the CD the beam get reflected to a point when there is some data on that are i.e. 0 or 1 the points where light beam lands back is different which symbolizes the bit value.
When something on the CD breaks the path of the laser light, something like dust particle or something else like a FINGER PRINT!!!. Finger prints are nothing but natural oil from skin that sticks to the surface in contact with the skin in a pattern of skin cells. This oil or say fingerprint helps in refraction of light and loss of data to the reading source i.e. laser.
When CDs don't run the reason is because something is interrupting the laser to read the shinny side of the CD. But I have important data what should I do now?
Most of the times it is because of dust or fingerprints, you need to clean the CD.
You can clean your CDs with plain water or a bit soapy water. And it is better to clean the CDs after some time. But this doesn't mean you should start putting your CDs in dishwasher or washing machine every week.
All you need to do is to wipe the shinny side of the CD with a clean moist cloth and try running it again make sure the CD is dry before you run it.
People say about using all different sorts of things to clean CDs like toothpastes, wax polish etc. but I would recommend you to buy some CD cleaning kit. But if you still want to go try, do let me know the results.
And one thing I must add is that DVD work on the same principle and are bit more sensitive to dust and fingerprints. You can also use the above mentioned procedure for DVDs. But you need to be careful with DVDs
Recover Deleted Excel Spreadsheets
Today, Microsoft Excel clearly possesses dominant market share in the spreadsheet product market. Its proprietary XLS format is compatible throughout the range of Microsoft Excel versions, and is a de facto standard at home and in the office. It is hard to overestimate the number of spreadsheets and the amount of important data stored in XLS files all over the world. But what if your computer's hard drive fails and you lose access to all spreadsheets? Or what if you simply delete an XLS spreadsheet on which you've spent hours of work?
Don't panic! Everything may not be lost just yet, and you may be able to recover all information without a sweat. To maximize your chances of successful recovery, minimize your activity on the computer where the lost files were. While you cannot be completely sure that Windows does not write anything on the disk that stores your lost files, the goal is essentially to limit disk write operations until you get back all important data from that disk. Any data that's written on a disk that contains deleted or inaccessible data on it can, and probably will, overwrite the deleted files on the disk and destroy information that was stored in them.
Anecdotally, one of the worst things you can do is looking for a tool that will undelete or recover your XLS files, installing and trying out such tools in action. On a typical PC, any Web page you open in a browser will cause several file writes to a hard drive, reducing your chances of successful data recovery. Any program that you download or install is also written to your hard disk. Finally, as not all products are equal, running a wrong type of data recovery application bears an unacceptably high risk of losing your lost Excel spreadsheets forever.
DiskInternals Excel Recovery is designed specifically to find and recover Microsoft Excel XLS spreadsheets safely and securely, no matter how badly your hard drive or the file system are damaged. If you simply deleted an XLS file, DiskInternals Excel Recovery will look up the file system to find all XLS files that were deleted recently, and test each file for the possibility of successful recovery. In bad cases or if your hard drive crashed or the file system is corrupt, DiskInternals Excel Recovery will scan entire hard drive's surface in order to locate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that aren't marked in the file system. The product uses a list of signatures associated with Microsoft XLS file format in order to detect precisely the beginning and end of each and every Microsoft Excel spreadsheet on your hard disk, extracts and validates their contents and metadata on the fly. This method works even on disks that are completely inaccessible in Windows!
The product matches the results obtained with the file system scan against those obtained by scanning surface of the hard disk, and displays the complete list of recoverable Excel spreadsheets along with their file names, metadata and contents, giving you the best possibility of successful recovery.
If you only need to recover the latest version of an Excel spreadsheet, you can use "On the Fly" filters that allow to only showing XLS files with specific title, created by specific author, or the files that contain certain text, are of a certain size, or are last saved on a specific date. The free version of DiskInternals Excel Recovery allows full file preview to ensure that you can recover exactly the files you need.
Download and try an evaluation version for free from http://www.diskinternals.com/. You only need to purchase when you see for yourself that DiskInternals Excel Recovery provides you complete recovery of your XLS files in your particular circumstances.
Don't panic! Everything may not be lost just yet, and you may be able to recover all information without a sweat. To maximize your chances of successful recovery, minimize your activity on the computer where the lost files were. While you cannot be completely sure that Windows does not write anything on the disk that stores your lost files, the goal is essentially to limit disk write operations until you get back all important data from that disk. Any data that's written on a disk that contains deleted or inaccessible data on it can, and probably will, overwrite the deleted files on the disk and destroy information that was stored in them.
Anecdotally, one of the worst things you can do is looking for a tool that will undelete or recover your XLS files, installing and trying out such tools in action. On a typical PC, any Web page you open in a browser will cause several file writes to a hard drive, reducing your chances of successful data recovery. Any program that you download or install is also written to your hard disk. Finally, as not all products are equal, running a wrong type of data recovery application bears an unacceptably high risk of losing your lost Excel spreadsheets forever.
DiskInternals Excel Recovery is designed specifically to find and recover Microsoft Excel XLS spreadsheets safely and securely, no matter how badly your hard drive or the file system are damaged. If you simply deleted an XLS file, DiskInternals Excel Recovery will look up the file system to find all XLS files that were deleted recently, and test each file for the possibility of successful recovery. In bad cases or if your hard drive crashed or the file system is corrupt, DiskInternals Excel Recovery will scan entire hard drive's surface in order to locate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that aren't marked in the file system. The product uses a list of signatures associated with Microsoft XLS file format in order to detect precisely the beginning and end of each and every Microsoft Excel spreadsheet on your hard disk, extracts and validates their contents and metadata on the fly. This method works even on disks that are completely inaccessible in Windows!
The product matches the results obtained with the file system scan against those obtained by scanning surface of the hard disk, and displays the complete list of recoverable Excel spreadsheets along with their file names, metadata and contents, giving you the best possibility of successful recovery.
If you only need to recover the latest version of an Excel spreadsheet, you can use "On the Fly" filters that allow to only showing XLS files with specific title, created by specific author, or the files that contain certain text, are of a certain size, or are last saved on a specific date. The free version of DiskInternals Excel Recovery allows full file preview to ensure that you can recover exactly the files you need.
Download and try an evaluation version for free from http://www.diskinternals.com/. You only need to purchase when you see for yourself that DiskInternals Excel Recovery provides you complete recovery of your XLS files in your particular circumstances.
Monday, December 29, 2008
4 Simple Tips To Fix A Scratched Cd Or Dvd
In this article I will be showing you four little known tips to fix scratched CD or DVD and recover the data within, Every user has had trouble with a scratched CD or DVD. The theory goes like this - A CD/DVD reader or player uses a laser beam to read the data on the disk. This laser beam crosses the protective plastic layer and reads the real recording metal layer. If the protective plastic layer is scratched, the laser will be unable to pass resulting in non-readable disc. In the case of data CDs the CD/DVD reader is unable to read the CD/DVD properly resulting in reading errors while in case of audio/video discs, the CD player skips when we play it.
If somehow we manage to re-smooth this protective layer then the laser will reach the data and read it, now there are many ways we can achieve this using common household item’s as discussed below:
1). Toothpaste - Yups! Toothpaste is our very first scratched CD/DVD fixer, you can use any non-gel based toothpaste for this, just put a very small amount of it on the scratched area and polish it gently using a cotton swab, sometimes the paste may cause new minor scratches but they are just superficial. Now just wash the cd using water.
2). If the above trick does not work try some metal polish like Brasso gently wiping with a soft cotton ball followed by application of Vaseline.
3). Baking Soda - make a small quantity of baking soda paste and apply using a soft cotton cloth buffing the bad scratch. Clean the baking soda before using the disc.
4). You can also try using some oil as a polishing agent this also works many times.
There are many daily use products that can be used to get the cd working just keep on experimenting, please note that you must take special care while using the above tips
If somehow we manage to re-smooth this protective layer then the laser will reach the data and read it, now there are many ways we can achieve this using common household item’s as discussed below:
1). Toothpaste - Yups! Toothpaste is our very first scratched CD/DVD fixer, you can use any non-gel based toothpaste for this, just put a very small amount of it on the scratched area and polish it gently using a cotton swab, sometimes the paste may cause new minor scratches but they are just superficial. Now just wash the cd using water.
2). If the above trick does not work try some metal polish like Brasso gently wiping with a soft cotton ball followed by application of Vaseline.
3). Baking Soda - make a small quantity of baking soda paste and apply using a soft cotton cloth buffing the bad scratch. Clean the baking soda before using the disc.
4). You can also try using some oil as a polishing agent this also works many times.
There are many daily use products that can be used to get the cd working just keep on experimenting, please note that you must take special care while using the above tips
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