10 reasons why PCs crash U must Know

10 reasons why PCs crash U must Kno

 Fatal error: the system has become unstable or is busy," it says. "Enter to return to Windows or press Control-Alt-Delete to restart your computer. If you do this you will lose any unsaved information in all open applications."

 You have just been struck by the Blue Screen of Death. Anyone who uses Mcft Windows will be familiar with this. What can you do? More importantly, how can you prevent it happening?

Cool Computer Tricks

Looking cool computer tricks? Here is something that should pique your interest: Use Keyboard As Mouse, On Screen Keyboard and Transform your Windows XP in to Windows 7.

Use Keyboard As Mouse

When mouse isn’t working properly , this trick can be very helpful. To activate mouse keys all you do is press Alt+Left shift key + NumLock and click OK or press enter .

Use the Numerical pad for controlling the mouse pointer.

5 is for click.
+ is for double click
- for right click.

On Screen Keyboard

On screen keyboard is one of the coolest windows features that displays a virtual keyboard on the computer screen that allows people with mobility impairments to type data by using a pointing device or joystick..
To use it go to start-> run and type osk

Transform your Windows XP in to Windows 7

If you are using Windows XP and want to experience Windows 7 without installing then here is Seven Remix XP transformation pack to transform Windows XP to Windows 7.With this simple app you can make your XP look like Windows 7 in just few clicks. It supports Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Media Center Edition and some other flavors of XP. Will work with only 32 bit edition of Windows.
Just download it and install .
Download Seven Remix XP and transform your windows xp .

Microsoft Windows Hidden Program

1- Private Character Editor

This program is for designing icons and Characters(Alphapet)
Click :start
Then :run
type :EUDCEDIT
.................................................. ..................................................

2- iExpress
This Program is for conerting your files to EXCUTABLE files
Click : start
Then : run
type : iexpress
.................................................. ..................................................

3-Disk Cleanup
This program used for cleaning harddisk to offer space
Click : start
Then : run
type : cleanmgr

.................................................. ..................................................

Program ............. CODE
__________ __________

Character Map = charmap

DirectX diagnosis = dxdiag

Remote Access phone book = rasphone

Registry Editor = regedit

File siganture verification tool = sigverif

Volume Contro = sndvol

System Configuration Editor = sysedit

Syskey = syskey

Memory vs Virus

 
Many users have noticed that their machines often slow down for no apparent reason. This may be virus related, or it may be a memory problem. Determining which one isn't very hard for the experienced user, but the inexperienced might have some difficulty. It's important to recognize the difference between malicious software, and lacking hardware.

While viruses can certainly make your computer run slow, there are usually other signs that accompany them. New icons on your desktop, odd behaviors, and programs telling you your machine is infected that you didn't install. These are all symptoms of a virus and can slow your machine down. However there is one other explanation for these slow downs that you need to consider.

I'm talking about your system memory, or RAM. RAM is an acronym that stands for Random Access Memory and is very important to your computer. Regardless of what operating system you use every machine uses RAM. When you save a document or project that you have been working on it is saved to the computers hard disk also known as a hard drive.

When your computer loads a program it is loaded into the systems RAM. Unlike a hard drive which is static memory, a RAM stick is volatile memory. When the power is turned off to your machine the information stored on the hard disk stays stored, whereas what's loaded into the RAM is erased. RAM is primarily used as a temporary storage medium on your machine to load and execute programs or commands.

Insufficient RAM can lead to your system slowing down, sometimes severely due to the requirements. For example, an older operating system may only need a minimum of 256 megabytes of RAM to function. This is the bare minimum without any noticeable slowdowns, you won't be doing much, but the machine will work. A newer operating system may require 1 gigabyte of RAM minimum, a gigabyte being 1024 megabytes.

Trying to install and run this operating system on a computer with 256 megabytes of RAM is not going to work well. The reason for this is that as operating systems advance there are a greater volume of programs that need to be loaded into the RAM. When you play a movie in a media player the movie is loaded into RAM for easy playback. Insufficient RAM leads to stuttering in movie playback, and requires you to pause until the system catches up.

When you don't have enough RAM the system uses what is known as virtual memory. This is a section of your hard drive that your operating system designates as temporary RAM. Nothing is kept permanently on this area, but it is much slower. It's generally a good idea to have double the amount of RAM your operating system requires to ensure the best performance.

Slowdowns from insufficient RAM or system memory can also affect web browsing, gaming, be the cause of errors, and other computer headaches. While it does resemble a virus in some aspects, it can be solved much easier. You simply buy a RAM stick, and plug it into an open slot. Or you buy a higher capacity RAM chip and replace your existing one.

Alternative of windows software for linux

Linux is quickly gaining popularity, but there are still many users afraid to convert as they are not familiar with the applications. Today I , Abhishek nehra is back to introduce fifty of the most popular applications on this OS

ANIMATION SOFTWARE

Blender 3D: Blender 3D is a high-quality, robust animation program with a steep learning curve and the ability to create commercial-quality 3D animations. The software is completely free, with extensive documentation available online for free.
Pencil (2D): Pencil is a free 2D animation program intended to make traditional hand-drawn animations possible. Animations are drawn on individual 'pages', and then compiled together in a digital flipbook of sorts.
KPovModeler: KPovModeler is a composition/modeling program for making POV-Ray scenes: an excellent addition to Blender 3D, and intended KDE.
Stopmotion: Stopmotion is a program that allows you to capture and/or combine photos together to create a smooth stopmotion animation video. Not only works well for claymation and similar, but can also be used to create timelapse videos.
Synfig (2D): Synfig is a free 2D animation software package that states "two-dimensional animation has long been the domain of proprietary software...Synfig, a free software/open source tool for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources."
Anime Studio 5 (2D)($199.99): Anime Studio 5 is a powerful commercial application for creating 2D animations with the ability to import/export OBJ files, special effects scripting, layered animation, vector animation, and advanced timeline controls.

AUDIO SOFTWARE

Audio CD Extractor (ripper): Available through Add/Remove Applications, Audio CD Extractor (previously known as Sound Juicer) is an easy to use CD ripper, intended to make copying music CDs fast, simple, and straight-forward.
Audacity (recorder): Audacity is an excellent, free digital audio recorder/editor for nearly all audio types. It can record multiple channels, split channels, merge audio, and a wide array of other features. Supports recording from both line-in and sound card.
Sound Converter: This is an application for GNOME that accepts a wide array of different audio formats and converts them to mp3, wav, flac, or ogg.
Last Exit (player): Last Exit is a standalone player for Last.fm that allows you to add specific stations, search for stations, choose a neighbors station, or browse. You can set preferences, password protect it, and save changes.
Hipo iPod Management Tool: If you have an Apple iPod, the Hipo iPod Management Tool is an invaluable program that allows users to manage their device.
Utube-Ripper: Have you every come across a video on YouTube you wanted to save to your hard drive? With Utube Ripper, you can download and save either the entire video, or the audio only. Very sleek and easy to use.
Freqtweak: According to Add/Remove Applications, “FreqTweak is a tool for real time audio spectral manipulation and display. It provides several algorithms for processing audio data in the frequency domain and a highly interactive GUI to manipulate the associated filters for each. It also provides high resolution spectral displays.”

VIDEO SOFTWARE

VLC: VLC is arguably the most popular video player on any operating system. It supports nearly every video type available, offers the ability to change audio settings, choose audio channels (headphones, full bass, etc.), change video aspect ratio and more. The program is lightweight and easy to use.
AcidRip: AcidRip is a simple, straightforward tool for copying a DVD to a digital video file, with codecs such as XviD, x264, MPEG, and more available. It allows you to control file size, audio settings, quality, cropping, etc.
Avidemux: Avidemux is an excellent video editing application. You can add filters, meticulously manipulate audio and video, combine VOBs, combine videos, and much more.
DVD::RIP: While AcidRip is the best tool to use if you want to create a video straight from a DVD, DVD::RIP is ideal if you want to convert an ISO or VOB files. Simply start the program, load the file, and then choose the video settings and transcode to an AVI or other file format.
Gnome Subtitles: Edit, add, and manipulate subtitles on a video using this free program.
iriverter: iriverter is a frontend for mencoder that makes it simple to convert videos for a wide array of portable video devices, including the Creative Vision M and iRiver players. Single and batch conversions can be done.
Wink: Wink is a free video program for creating video screencasts; an excellent program for creating video tutorials and presentations, with the ability to add explanation boxes to the video.
XBMC Media Center: XBMC is an award-winning media center for multiple platforms, and is fully supported on Ubuntu. The program is sophisticated and high-quality, and is a top-notch media player that can organize and play videos, music, and photos, including previews and album covers.

GRAPHICS

GIMP: GIMP is the Linux alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It is an advanced image authoring/editing program with an animation engine and a wide array of plugins/filters/brushes. It can do nearly everything Photoshop can do, but does require one to learn it proficiently in order to exploit it's features.

Hugin: Hugin is a high-quality panorama maker. It combines two or more photos and combines them into one panorama. It blends colors to make seams between photos unnoticeable, allows you to choose a lens style for the pano (fisheyes, etc.), and to manually choose connection points.
Comix: Comix is a comic book viewer for Linux. It is high-quality, works smoothly, and offers all the necessary components for viewing digital comics, including double-page support, zoom, rotation, mirroring, fullscreen mode, fit-to-screen mode, image enhancement, image quality toggle, and bookmarks.

FlickrUploader: Flickr Uploader is a desktop program that makes it easy to instantly upload your images to your Flickr account.
Inkscape: Inkscape is a sophisticated vector graphics program similar to Adobe Illustrator.

Phatch Photo Batch Processor: Phatch is a batch processor for photos, making it easy to resize, crop, rotate, add rounded corners, change perspective, or a wide array of other features in just a few minutes.
QCaD: QCaD is as close to autoCAD as you can get on Ubuntu. It offers the ability to create and files, with support for autoCADR and similar files

OFFICE

xPDF: xPDF is a suite of PDF tools, including a lightweight viewer with support for standard, Truetype, and Type 1 fonts, conversion tools for converting PDFs into different formats, and support for multiple languages.
AbiWord: Abiword is a popular, lightweight and yet sophisticated word processor that works very well on Linux. It is best for those who need to create documents, but don't require a massive amount of features
OpenOffice Writer: OpenOffice Writer is a large, high-end word processor. It works well on Linux, and has all the features you could possibly need. If you're looking for a complete alternative to MS Word, Writer is your best option.
OpenOffice Spreadsheet: Very similar to MS Excel.
OpenOffice Presentation: Alternative to MS PowerPoint.
OpenOffice Impress: Alternative to MS Publisher.
KAddressBook: KAddress is a personal contacts/address manager.
KOrganizer: KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling app with the ability to track important dates, add notes, and export to industry standard files. GnuCash: GnuCash a finance management software suitable for both personal and business use. It can support major file types, such as Quickbooks files, and tracks multiple accounts, constantly calculating new balances and tracking everything needed, including investments and expenses.
xCHM: xCHM is a CHM HTML file viewer, suitable for viewing large HTML ebooks and files saved in the CHM file type.

UTILITIES

GPSDrive: A navigation system designed to work with a GPS receiver. Offers the ability to zoom and display maps downloaded or generated as needed via OpenStreetMap.
Gnome Partition Editor: The Partition Editor allows you to easily manipulate partitions with support for multiple file structures.
Virtual Box OSE: Virtual Box is a virtual machine application, allowing you to run different OS's inside your Linux machine.
ClamAV: Clam AV is an anti-virus software app for Linux, and works very well.
Gmount-ISO: Gmount is a frontend for a Terminal command that allows you to easily mount a DVD or CD ISO image.

INTERNET

Opera: Opera is a lightweight browser with wide support and a customizable launch page.
Mozilla Firefox: Firefox is the most popular Internet browser for Linux, offering stability, wide support, and a massive amount of plugins.
Thunderbird: Thunderbird a popular email client from the Mozilla line of Internet applications. It offers multiple account access, IMAP and SMTP, password protection, address books, and more.
SeaMonkey: SeaMonkey is based on Firefox Internet browser, but is more stable.
Evolution:Evolution is another email client, but appears very similar to Microsoft's Outlook.
Pidgin IM: An instant messaging client that support AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! IRC, Zephyr, Gadu, Groupwise, SIMPLE, SILC, Sametime, Napster, MSN, and Jabber.
gFTP: gFTP is a file transfer protocol app for Linux offering support for a wide array of uploads and downloads.

Improve your laptops battery life

How many times have you found yourself with a dead laptop battery and no outlet in sight? I know I have, but it’s only happened to me on a few occasions thanks to these tips. You can mitigate being left dry without power to run your laptop by following the easy to implement steps below.
Some of the tips below may seem insignificant with regards to the amount of battery saved, however combined these tips could add minutes to even half an hour of additional battery life so make sure to use them in unison.

1. Reduce Screen Brightness

One of the simplest and most effective ways to reduce the amount of electricity consumed by your notebook is to reduce the brightness of the screen. This can be accomplished in several ways: You can set the brightness manually by using the buttons found on the keyboard that will control the brightness of the screen.
The second option would be to use the built-in power control options in Windows to automatically adjust the brightness of the screen based on use. In Windows 7 you have the option to automatically turn off the display after “x” number of minutes without use. If automatically turning off the display doesn’t work for you then you can set the display to automatically dim to the lowest setting after “x” number of minutes without use.
The third option which is found in the same control panel window is to automatically adjust the screen’s brightness based on whether or not the notebook is running on battery or plugged in.

2. Disable Desktop Background Slideshows

In Windows 7 Microsoft introduced a slew of new features that improve the overall look and feel of the Windows environment. Among those new features is the ability to have rotating wallpapers. Although extremely appealing this little feature consumes a bit of power while running in the background. You have to options to mitigate the power consumption of this feature.
You can increase the time interval between wallpaper changes from 30 minutes (default) to one or two hours. You can also disable the feature altogether by visiting the Advanced Power Settings in Windows 7.

3. Turn Off Unnecessary Radios

How often do you actually use your Bluetooth radio? Most laptops today ship with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, some even have 3G/EVDO and WiMAX radios. If you are running on battery while working on your laptop and you really don’t need the internet, why connect to the internet? Connecting to the internet requires that you use a good amount of electricity that could be saved to extend the battery on your laptop.
Ok, so you do need the internet, but what about Bluetooth? Unless you are syncing your BlackBerry wirelessly or using a Bluetooth peripheral there is no need to keep the Bluetooth radio on, which by the way, is also consuming electricity.
Both radios can be turned off by physical switch or button on your laptop. If you wish to turn one off, but not the other you will have to go to your computer’s Control Panel to turn the radio off independently.

4. Work on One Application

Believe or not, Apple does have a good point about multi-tasking and battery consumtion, just ask an Android or Palm Web OS user. The same applies to the PC, the more apps/programs you run on your laptop the more power your laptop will consume.
Unless you are using a specific application while trying to complete a task, close it. There is no need to have Outlook running in the background checking your messages every five minutes if you are trying to complete a proposal before your battery dies. Close applications you are not using and your battery will last longer.

5. Disable Background Programs

Even if you run one application at a time as suggested above, there are several applications and services that are running in the background that eat up the valuable battery life you are trying to conserve. An example of background applications that may be running in the background are listed below. I have also provided a link to a recently published article that lists some of the most common services that can be safely disabled.
Background Applications

• ZumoDrive • SugarSync • PandoraOne • DropBox • OneNote Side Note

List of services that can be safely disabled – Article

6. Disable Automatic Send/Receive

Programs like Outlook will automatically look for new messages every 30 minutes; this send/receive of information requires resources that will consume a small amount of battery life. The default setting for Outlook is about 30 minutes, but what if you’ve changed that setting to every 5 minutes or worse every minute?
All email clients have this functionality so you can extend the amount of time between email checks or disable them all together. The option is yours.

7. Defragment Your Hard Drive

How long does it take to locate a book in a bookshelf that is not organized alphabetically? Now how long does it take to locate that same book when it is organized alphabetically? A lot faster. The same applies to your computer’s hard drive; if the files are fragmented (scattered) all over your computer will take a longer time locating files.
If your computer were defragmented (organized) then files would be found in a snap. All this means is that if your hard drive is fragmented, the hard drive will have to work harder to locate those files which means that more power will be consumed.
Want to optimize your hard drive while saving battery life? Defragment your hard drive. Windows ships with a built-in defragmentation application, so put it to good use and schedule defragmentation a least once a week.

8. Remove Disc Media from Drives

Believe it or not, each time you open My Computer to browse the contents of your computer, the CD/DVD drive spins if a disc is inserted into the drive. It will also spin when you boot up and shut down the computer. All of these spins require power to move the small motor the spins the drive. To squeeze a little more battery life out of your laptop, consider removing any removable media that could “spin” while using your laptop.

9. Hibernate Don’t Sleep

If you need to turn your computer off, but want instant access to it you may be tempted to put it to Sleep, however when your laptop is in Sleep mode it is placed in a low power state, meaning that you are still consuming battery power. What if you meant to put the computer down for 30 minutes, but got caught up with something else and came back to it four hours later only to find that the battery died?
You can keep this from happening and save battery life by placing your computer in a Hibernate state rather than Sleep. Hibernate saves your laptop’s current state onto the hard drive and turns off the computer. This means there will be no power consumption and you can boot right up.

10. Take Care of Your Battery

Long gone are the days of having to make sure you completely discharged the batter before recharging. All you have to worry about is that you make sure you store your battery when not in use. If you plan to leave your laptop plugged in for more than a couple of weeks, you might want to consider removing the battery and storing it in a dry location.
Note: Whenever you remove your battery make sure that the battery contacts are clean and free of any dust or gunk that builds over time.
These tips will help maintain the battery’s charge capacity and extend its life. Do you have any other tips to help squeeze more battery life out of a laptop? Please post them below.

Cannot See Your USB Device?

Did you plug in a USB device (storage) such as a flash drive, memory card, mp3 player, phone, etc and you don’t see its “drive” in My Computer?
This may be a problem with your drive mappings or a driver problem.
I will explain the drive mappings ( drive letter) and will explain how to see the driver error.

(Remember, clicking on an image, will open a new window/tab hopefully increasing the size and ability to understand it better!)
— Assigning A Drive Letter —
1) Plug In Your Device! and make sure, if its the first time, that you see something like

2) Check In My Computer for the device, if not found…
3) Goto Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc
4) Select a disk without a drive letter already assigned, and one that is “REMOVABLE”!

4) Choose “Change Drive Letter and Paths…”
5) Click Add
6) Choose a drive letter (not A: or B: (floppy drives) or C: through E: (cd/dvd drives & hard drives), the default drive should be sufficient.

7) Click Ok Twice
8 ) Your diskmgmt.msc window should now look like the following…

Note: If you received a type of error, please comment below.
9) Now in My Computer there should be your drive
— If Your Device Is Not Listed —

1) Make sure it is plugged in…
2) Open Start > Run > devmgmt.msc
3) Check for any “errors” and attempt to fix them
4) If you are having trouble, feel free to once again, comment below, or email me.
5) Try reinstalling the “drivers” supplied with your device (optional)

Clear your hard drive of huge files/folders!

Don’t you hate it how Windows doesn’t show the size of folders unless you right-click and choose properties. Well, that can take a long time if your looking through your whole hard drive, trying to find out what is taking up all that space.
TreeSize Free is a free, small program that shows you the biggest folders on your hard drive and then gives you easy access to viewing or deleting them. If you are planning on using the application a lot, then I would run the installer but if not, then just download the EXE and run.

If you are on Windows Vista, or Windows 7, then run the program as an Administrator. When you first open TreeSize Free, you are presented with a blank screen:

Goto “Scan” at the top and then choose the drive that you want to “review”. Almost instantly results start appearing for your drive and if you haven’t touched any of the settings, then the largest file/folder is at the top of the list. Included behind each folder is a yellow-to-orange bar which shows you visually how much of drive it is actually taking up. Hovering over a folder/file displays a detailed tooltip that shows more than enough information for the average power user!  Below is a quick screenshot of what it looked like after I scanned my Windows 7 machine.

When looking at a folder, you can click the “+” to expand the folder and see the largest files/folders in that folder. When you decided what files/folders to delete you can easily right click on them and choose delete, or if you know the program that the folder is associated to, then you can just go ahead and uninstall or change that program should you want more space. A good idea would be to remove more installed components and favor using the cd when running the program (this may not be supported by all installations).
If you want to delete a file from within the Program Files directory, you need to run the application as an Administrator. Also, I would NOT recomend deleting anything from the ‘Windows” folder.
Overall the program is very simple and yet very informative. If you plan on using the program a lot then I would install it, but if you are just planning on using it a couple of times (when needed) then the downloaded zip should be fine!

Why to make your desktop clean?

Whenever I’m away from my computer and have to rely on someone else’s, one thing that I notice many times is how unorganized some of those desktops are. A messy amount of icons populate a page that, on a productivity point of view, should be left clean.

Why have a desktop at all if it’s not to be used to store temporary items, you may ask. Just imagine you have a desktop full of files, sometimes not even organized by type nor alphabetically. Well, here is my why:

• Time lost. You need to find a file that you are sure you saved on your desktop three weeks ago. Now, find it amidst the masses. How much time does it take you to find that file? Maybe some seconds. Multiply that by the number of times you have to find a file during a year. See what I mean?
• Decrease in productivity. There are files that you should be working on now, there are those that you should look at in a few days. If you loose these in the middle of all the others living in your desktop, will you remember them? Probably only when someone comes at you and asks if you had time to review that last report due in tomorrow. Then I’m sure you will remember.
• A cluttered desktop is a source of stress. How this affects you depends on your standards and your capacity to deal with disorganization. Might only affect a little, might affect much. But as soon as that critical level is reached, there is a certain amount of stress being created every time you look at it. And if your working files are all there, these are many times a day. Another source of stress? I think you don’t need it.
• The “Desktop cycle effect”. You know that you should clean it, you know how much better it would look and how much more productive you would become. But it’s just a big pain to even think about organizing it. Well, let me tell you this: it is not going to clean itself up (Do you really trust that little balloon that sometimes comes up saying “There are unused items in your desktop. Do you want to clean them now?”). And the more the days pass, more cluttered it will look (assuming that you just don’t stop working). And here is the cycle effect: The more time you let pass, the more painful it will be to clean, the more time you let pass…
• Computer slowness problems. If you have a not so much state-of-the-art computer, you might have experienced slowness when going to the desktop to find something, that effect that resembles the shutters of a window coming down. Your computer is taking too long to load your desktop (specially if you have a fancy desktop picture). Are you willing to suffer that every time you need to look for something there?
• Your desktop says much about you. So you have a company meeting or some other presentation that is more informal. You are setting up your laptop as your colleagues pour into the room… and on the screen, behold, that infamous messy desktop of yours for everyone to see. Are you willing to bet that no one is going to pass judgement on that? Oh, and are all those files work related or can I see some pictures and movies there too? Your boss also can. Not giving presentations? Doesn’t matter, someone at some time will look over your shoulder while you work and spot the mess.

An organized computer desktop not only denotes productivity and organization skills, but it’s also a much easier environment to work on.
Make a habit of cleaning it regularly. You’ll see how much that will improve your productivity and sense of accomplishment. Organization actually pays.
In my next post I’ll give you a few tips on how to organize your desktop and keep it organized in a way that you’ll never “lose” files again simply because you always know where they are.
And your desktop? Is it as “clean” as you wanted it to be? Do you suffer from any of the points I made above? Share with us your tips for a clutter free desktop.

Play PC Games Without Using Graphics Card.

Many of us has a desire of playing PC games at high-quality. But some of us can’t fulfill our desire because of the non-availability of Graphics card or we can’t afford. Today, maximum pc games demand graphic card or pixelshader and by this we can’t play the best games we have around nowadays.

Now, there is a solution to this problem and the name of the solution is 3D-Analyzer. Yes, 3D-Analyze is tool for transform and lightning hardware emulation. We can run TnL games on video cards that have not on board dedicated circuits for TnL calculations. You can say that it uses power of central processing unit to do emulation.

It also can emulate all the feature of 3d graphics like pixelshader 1.1, 1.4, 2.0, bump maps and etc. let’s watch how it works:

• First download 3D Analyze 2.36 (latest).

• Now extract 3D Analyze to a folder and run it.

• Once it is opened click ‘SELECT’, and browse for the .exe file for the game you want to run.

• You will usually want to tick all of the options under ‘hardware limits’. Some of the games only need ‘emulate HW TnL caps’, so you might need to experiment around.

• Some games will only recognize certain 3D cards brands and models. If so, enter the values of the given cards in the ‘Vendor ID’ and ‘Device ID’ section.

• Try running the game by clicking on ‘RUN’.

• And then enjoy.

Data Recovery from Damaged CD/DVD

We always form a back-up of the data in case our system crashes. This back-up is usually in the form of  the most widely accepted CDs and DVDs.

Though this form of back-up storage is gaining widespread popularity, it has its own share of problems as well.
If not stored properly the scratches on the discs makes it unreadable and even if u store it properly then also problem may exist, be it a commercial disc or a self burned one.

The important question of the hour is how to  recover data from defective or scratched discs. What will happen if the back-up only becomes inaccessible!! To spare you from the horror of losing your valuable data, data recovery  software known as CD DVD Data Recovery  Software is designed to recover data from defective discs.

How Does This Software Work?

Recovering data from CD DVD isn’t rocket science. What the CD DVD data recovery  software does is a complete scan of the disc surface. While scanning it skips those files which are not readable and copy all the other bytes to get the maximum data out of the CD. All this is done at the byte level thus copying the readable data to the destination directory.

There a number of CD DVD data recovery  softwares available at your service in the market. Below are listed the softwares which are available for free to recover your data from damaged discs .

CD DVD Data Recovery  Softwares

1.ABYSSAL RECOVERY

As the name suggests, abyssal recovery stands for unfathomable recovery,i.e, it recovers the data as far as possible. It scans the disc surface skipping the unreadable data and copying the readable one into a destination directory. This task is performed at the byte level ensuring that the destination directory contains all data that could be read from the disc.

2.ISO BUSTER

If your disc consists of primarily images,audio or video files then this data recovery  software will surely serve your purpose as it does not depend on Windows to work as an interface but directly communicates with the drive. In usual practice, Windows fetches the files and folders from the discs thereby limiting the data read from the disc. But ISO Buster can read even those data which cant be done by Windows. Even if Windows is unable to read any data, this software provides you with many re-try mechanisms to extract the data from the disc.

A wide range of image file formats, such as: *.DAO, *.TAO, *.ISO, *.BIN, *.IMG, *.CIF, *.FCD, *.NRG, *.GCD, *.P01, *.C2D, .CUE, *.CD, *.GI and many more is supported by ISO Buster.

3.CD RECOVERY TOOL-BOX

This software not only enhances the speed of recovery but also improves the quality of the recovered data. This feature is attributed to the fact that the Recovery Toolbox for CD free uses different algorithms. It can recover data from different disc types, viz. CD, DVD, HD DVD, Blu-Ray to name a few. This tool performs a complete scan of the disc and saves as much information as possible.

4.CDCheck

“Better late than never”! this is what this software does. It keeps a time to time check that the data on your CD ROM is safe, before it is too late to detect the problem. CDCheck not only recover the damaged file but is also responsible for the prevention and detection of  corrupted files on your CD ROM. Its prime feature is the error detection mechanism. Apart from that it provides the following features as well,viz. readability verification, binary comparison, CRC file creation and file recovery.

So, listed above are data recovery  softwares which will prove helpful for recovering your data from damaged and scratched discs. If there are any further add-on to the above mentioned list of softwares then the gesture is most welcomed!

Frustrated with Access Denied??

 Sometimes certain unpleasing greetings await for you when you go ahead to delete a file or folder. Some of them are as undercoated :

The Access is denied or maybe the source or destination file may already be in use. Sometimes you encounter
an undesirable message like cannot delete a particular file reason being it is used by some other person or program. Some other message like cannot delete a  Folder, the reason again being the same that it is being used by another person or program. The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. At times there may be a violation problem due to sharing. A decent solution for this kind of problem is to close any programs that might be using the file and try again.

Another aid can be to make sure that the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

 When you start encountering such statements it becomes very frustrating.Right? Generally when you restart windows, the problem gets solved. But there may be instances when this does not work even, in such a case you can always resort to a third party software that is File And Folder Unlocker that is a freeware.

This is a very easy to use and provides full flexibility as well as control over the locked files and folders that you have on your computer.

The trick is off course restarting the windows, however if there us a failure it may be a virus. Not necessary a virus, a trojan perhaps. Such malware inhibit file deletion and to avoid such a situation perform a complete antivirus scan.

Gladinet 3.0 Creates Dropbox-Like Folder Sync Through Google Storage

Windows only: Gladinet provides desktop-style access to storage on Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Microsoft's SkyDrive, and other cloud services. Its newest release improves its interface greatly, but also adds a key convenience: backing up a local folder through cloud services.

The new interface is nice, but it's the cloud-based folder backup that's got our attention. With version control, that means you've basically got a Dropbox-like backup service running through Google storage (which is remarkably cheap, by the way). All the other advantages of Gladinet that were present in the original release are still there, just better organized, and now with more purpose.
Gladinet is a free download for Windows systems only, with additional features available in paid versions.
Gladinet Blog: Gladinet Cloud Desktop 3.0 Released

How to Increase Speed of Your PC

One of the most effective and useful tool to speed up the performance of your computer is to defragment your hard drive. Defragmentation of the hard drive is referred to rearranging the scattered files stored in your hard drive.
Actually the data you store in your hard drive increases with the course of time. Then data becomes scattered in the hard drive and needs arrangement so that computer can easily access and run programs from the hard drive. If data is arranged with the help of defragmentation then computer easily access the data and thus requires less time to access and run the programs. Remember that the files stored on the hard drive are in fragmented form. These files are very hard for the computer to open and run. That is why computer supports the defragmentation tool because it helps a lot to let the computer open and run the files.

You should defragment each volume of your hard drive so that your computer can access all volumes very easily. This easement of accessing the entire hard drive would really boost up the performance speed of your computer. There is another tool which can add to the efficiency of your computer. This tool is called rebooting the computer. Rebooting is the most essential tool which can enable your computer to run faster in terms of performance and speed. You should prefer using disk defragmenter and the proper rebooting of your computer. The combine application of both these tools will surely enable your computer to easily access any file in no time. You would enjoy the reliable and convenient usage of your computer through this way. You should keep one thing in mind that you should never use online solutions for boosting up the performance of your computer. This would cause more damage to your computer because it can contain virus and malware attack.

GDataCopier Syncs Google Docs to Your Desktop

Windows/Mac/Linux: Looking for a quick way to upload and download files from a Google Docs account? If you're familiar with command line tools, check out GDataCopier. Once I installed a new version of Python (2.5 or higher required)
and the GData API for Python, it was just a matter of running gdata-cp.py and I had every document in my Google Docs account backed up to a folder on my desktop. It would also work great for uploading a batch of documents to Google Docs. And of course you can set it up with a crontab to schedule regular backups. Looking for alternatives to futzing in a terminal window? Windows users can use DocSyncer, sync between OpenOffice.org and Google Docs with OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs or download Google Docs from Firefox with a Greasemonkey script. GDataCopier is a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux, requires Python to run.

How to Make Your Caps Lock Key Search the Web, Chrome OS-Style

 

We've shown you many alternate uses for your Caps Lock key in the past, but if you like the idea of Chrome OS' search key (which replaces Caps Lock on the CR-48), here's how emulate it on Windows and OS X.

These tricks for Windows and Mac use the shortcut-creating AutoHotkey and Quicksilver/AppleScript combo, respectively. Essentially, they'll make it so whenever you hit the Caps Lock key, Chrome will come to the front of you rother windows, open up a new tab, and highlight the address bar, so you can search the web with one keystroke. If Chrome isn't open, it will open it for you.
If you're on Windows, just add this code to your main AutoHotkey script:

Capslock::
SetTitleMatchMode, 2
If WinExist("ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_0")
{
WinActivate
WinWaitActive
Send ^t
Send ^l
}
else
{
Run "C:\Users\Whitson Gordon\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"
sleep 100
Send ^t
Send ^l
}
return
+Capslock::Capslock

Note that you'll want to change Whitson Gordon to your own user name in the path to Google Chrome.
OS X, unfortuntaely, won't let you maps the Caps Lock key to a specific function alone. However, with a bit of tweaking, we can get it so a simple shortcut like Caps Lock+Space will work just fine. First, create a new AppleScript with this code as the body:

tell application "System Events"
        tell application "Google Chrome" to activate
        keystroke "t" using command down
        keystroke "l" using command down
end tell

Now, head into System Preferences > Keybaord and hit the Modifier Keys button. Change the Caps Lock key to perform a different action (I chose Control). Open up Quicksilver and create a new trigger as described here. Use something like Control+Space as your Hot Key. Now, Caps Lock+Space will open up a search-ready Chrome for you. Photo by Alex Harden.
Update: If you're a Firefox user, AutoHotkey ninja Platypus Man has already created a tweaked version that works in Firefox. If you're using Firefox on the Mac, just replace "Google Chrome" with Firefox.

What risks do viruses pose to the data on a hard drive?

When it comes to data storage, viruses can be divided into two basic categories:

• Viruses that delete data
• Viruses that corrupt data

Viruses that delete data will tell the operating system (such as Windows) to flag files as being deleted. The data itself becomes unavailable but it still exists on the platters until it’s overwritten. This data is recoverable using Data Recovery Softwares designed to perform data recovery which will scan the platters and mark recognizable files as not deleted, effectively restoring them to the directory structure.
Viruses that corrupt data are the most dangerous because they overwrite files with garbage data and then possibly flag them as deleted. This makes the data unrecoverable.
In either case, it is very important to have antivirus software running on any machine whether it’s connected to the internet or not (viruses can be propagated from CDs, floppies, and other storage mediums) and keep a backup of any critical data on a removable storage device which will help prevent viruses from propagating to your backup.

Compact Flash FAQs

 What is Compact Flash?
CompactFlash is the world’s smallest removable mass storage device. First introduced in 1994 by SanDisk Corporation, CF ^TM cards weigh a half ounce and are the size of a matchbook. They provide complete PCMCIA-ATA functionality
and compatibility. Compact Flash is a small, removable mass storage commonly used in digital cameras.
Where will CompactFlash be used? Several leading consumer electronics companies, including the CFA’s roster of founding members, are designing CF technology into next-generation products being developed for mass markets. The CFA expects CF technology will be widely used in such products as portable and desktop computers, digital cameras, handheld data collection scanners, cellular phones, PCS phones, PDAs, handy terminals, personal communicators, advanced two-way pagers, audio recorders, monitoring devices and set-top boxes. CF technology offers all of these applications new and expanded functionality while enabling smaller and lighter designs.
What is the difference between Type I and Type II?
Type I is 3.3mm thick, while Type II is 5mm thick. A CF Type II device will not fit in a Type I slot.
How do I format my Compact Flash drive?
Formatting a Compact Flash drive can be accomplished several ways. The most common method of formatting a Compact Flash drive is within the device in which the Compact Flash drive will be used. This will ensure a device compatible format and the best overall performance.
How do I interface the CF drive with my PC or Mac?
Compact Flash drives are connected to desktop/laptops computers through flash memory card readers. A typical card reader will contain multiple flash memory slots to accommodate the different types of memory. The card readers are most commonly attached to the computer via a USB or IEEE 1394 (FireWire) interface cable.
Do I need drivers for my OS?
Compact Flash drives do not require drivers. However, when the drive is attached through a card reader, the proper drivers for the card reader must be installed before the drive can be accessed.
Can I use this in my PDA? Does this drive require drivers?
The Compact Flash drive can be used in any PDA that will support Compact Flash Type II drives with high capacity. This is not a supported hardware environment.
While many PDA operating systems do not require drivers, some of the older operating systems, such as Windows CE, will require a driver before the drive can be accessed.
Can I install an OS onto this drive?
Depending on the operating system in use, it may be possible to install an OS onto the Compact Flash drive. Since this is not the intended purpose of the drive, the performance may be less than desired and no support will be provided.
What is the speed of my Compact Flash card?
Solid state CF memory cards are differentiated by a speed number:

Compact Flash Speeds
Speed	Kbytes/s	Mbytes/s
1	150	0.15
4	600	0.6
12	1800	1.8
24	3600	3.6
40	6000	6
60	9000	9
80	12000	12

What is the difference between FAT16 and FAT32, why do cards greater than 2GB require FAT32?
File Allocation Tables (FAT) are like a table of contents to your data. Prior to Windows 98, 16-bit FATs limited partitions to 2.1 Gbytes. The newer 32-bit FAT is capable of huge partitions up to two Tbytes (terabytes). Many digital cameras only support 16-bit FAT (FAT), newer cameras and high-end professional cameras usually support 32-bit FAT (FAT32). Check your camera’s manual or support information to determine if your camera supports FAT32 (memory larger than 2.1Gbytes).

RAID Controllers

What is a RAID Controller?

A disk array controller is a device which manages the physical disk drives and presents them to the computer as logical units. It almost always implements hardware RAID, thus it is sometimes referred to as RAID controller. It also often provides additional disk cache.

A disk array controller name is often improperly shortened to a disk controller. The two should not be confused as they provide very different functionality.

RAID Controller History:

While hardware RAID controllers were available for a long time, they always required expensive SCSI hard drives and aimed at the server and high-end computing market. SCSI technology advantages include allowing up to 15 devices on one bus, independent data transfers, hot-swapping, much higher MTBF.
Around 1997, with the introduction of ATAPI-4 (and thus the Ultra-DMA-Mode 0, which enabled fast data transfers with less CPU utilization) the first ATA RAID controllers were introduced as PCI expansion cards. Those RAID systems made their way to the consumer market, where the users wanted the fault-tolerance of RAID without investing in expensive SCSI drives.
ATA drives make it possible to build RAID systems at lower cost than with SCSI, but most ATA RAID controllers lack a dedicated buffer or high-performance XOR hardware for parity calculation. As a result, ATA RAID performs relatively poorly compared to most SCSI RAID controllers. Additionally, data safety suffers if there is no battery backup to finish writes interrupted by a power outage.

How to Choose a RAID Controller?

New RAID levels, technologies and interfaces make choosing a RAID controller more than just a choice between price and performance. These top tips provide valuable insight to help ensure that you get exactly the right controller to suit your specific data protection needs.
1. Choose the correct bus interface for your needs — forward- or backward-compatibility.
PCI-X has the advantage of being backwardly compatible with the older PCI interface. But it is parallel and half-duplex bidirectional, and the bus runs only as fast as the slowest device. PCIe is the new forward-looking standard, and is intended to cope with the performance and scalability demands for at least the next decade. PCIe has the advantages of being serial, full-duplex bidirectional, and devices are able to independently negotiate the bus speed.
2. Find an easy-to-use Management Interface. 3. Which RAID level? Considering the factors: Cost of disk storage, Data protection or data availability required, Performance requirements
4. RAID level migration Consider how complex the process is to migrate your data from your current RAID to your new one and consider whether RAID level migration is something you need.
5. How much more data capacity will you need.
6. A limitation of SATA The SATA infrastructure allows for Port Multipliers, but they have drawbacks – they can’t be daisychained, limiting their flexibility and expandability; they only support one active host connection at a time, significantly degrading effective throughput and allowing for potential
misidentification of drives.
7. Getting locked in to your Operating System Your choice of RAID controller shouldn’t restrict either your choice of OS, or restrict the speed at which you can obtain an OS upgrade.
8. Reliability of the RAID code
9. Hardware or software RAID? The difference between hardware and software RAID isn’t just the price.With hardware RAID, the calculations are carried out by the RAID controller, with software RAID they take place on the server’s CPU. So, if the RAID calculations are fairly simple, say RAID 1 or RAID 10, and the server is fairly powerful, using software RAID shouldn’t be much of a problem. But with more
complex RAID level calculations (RAID 5EE or RAID 6 for example), using hardware RAID can be beneficial because the RAID performance is not compromised by the server’s workload, nor are applications on the server compromised by the RAID workload.With hardware RAID, the RAID functionality is also independent of the OS, and the simple HBA drivers required for a hardware RAID controller are usually available as part of the OS distribution. Also, if it has a battery, hardware RAID can run in write-back mode, adding another level of data protection.
10. Ensure the products you purchase have the support you need

How to Share Files

The moment we something good, we like to share it others. One of the easiest modes of sharing is through email. However, emailing does not allow you to send huge files to the recipients. If you are on a home or office network, you can share files easily using the networking feature of Windows but this technique want let you share huge files over the internet.
There are some amazing file sharing applications and online tools that let you share big files easily:

Windows Live SkyDrive

It provides you with an online storage space of 25GB that can be used for saving all kinds of files such as documents and media files. Since the online drive is protected by password, you can control who can access your files. A cool feature of Windows Live SkyDrive is that even lets you create, view and edit documents on MS Office.

Dropbox

Dropbox is an application that lets you synchronize your files on the internet. It works with various operating systems like Mac, Windows and Linux. It provides to 2GB online space for storing your files for free and for paid customers 100GB of space is provided. All the files are automatically synchronized when changes are detected. You can share files and let several people access them simultaneously. You can access your documents from anywhere through the web. You can make use of the free mobile device access app on devices like iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android.

Pando

Pando is a simple application that lets you send files of up to 1GB through any email. It also allows you to share photos, videos and documents through its dedicated instant messenger. After installing the app, you need to select the files and folders that you would like to share and immediately a copy of the files you want to share starts getting stored on the secure servers of Pando. The recipient will receive a email with a .pando attachment which when opened by the recipeient will allow him to download it from the files from the Pando server.

FilesOverMiles

The moment you open the site, you will see the Browse button which let you browse the huge files you would like to send other users P2P through your internet browser. You are not required to signup to use it. You can share size files of unlimited size. There are no servers in between you and your recipient that will slow down the process. You will also be able to fully control who downloads your shared file.

YouSendIt

YouSendIt provides you with a simple user interface to share your files. All you need to do is open their site and enter the email address of the recipient and yours and then browse for the file you want to send and then click on the Send button. The recipient will receive an email with a link to the shared file. Free account users can send files up to 100MB size.