Hard Disk Data Recovery Still An Important Asset

Hard Disk Data Recovery Still An Important Asset

Hard disks have evolved along the years to be a lot more reliable than their ancestors, but no matter how good they got to be, they are still open to damage and errors that could cause loss of data. If this happens, hard disk data recovery is the solution and a big problem solver if the information on the hard drive is important and not backed up.

A hard disk can crash because of a range of different reasons but the most encountered is an unstable power supply. A hard disk is quite open to attacks from sudden power surges or power outages. Such power problems can cause both physical damage and logical errors. Logical damages are possibly easy to fix with a HDD scan and fixing the disk file system.

In most cases, you can observe some signs or symptoms that the unit is about to crash. An imminent crash will cause frequent disk error messages. If the disk will not be shown during the startup of the operating system or the information provided is incorrect when the disk is analyzed are almost sure signs of hard disk damage. If you can hear your HDD make weird sounds, clicking or whirring, the problem is mechanical and you will need professional hard disk data recovery assistance.

Some regular clues that may suggest hard disk damage are:

* When files are accessed or the system is powered up you might head ticking, grinding or clunking noises * Problems with the operating system booting process * Problems reading files that exist on the hard drive

To have your data safe, in case you notice such signs, make sure you back up the drive or the most important information at least. This way you will have an easy solution if the worst happens.

There are software applications that you can use to recover hard disk data and correct logical errors but they are quite dangerous in the hands of unexperienced users. If the information present on the damaged hard drive is of an elevated importance you might want to use the services of hard disk data recovery company.

by nahar Dijla
Keyword : Hard Disk Data Recovery

Zombie Computers Roam The Internet

Zombie Computers Roam The Internet

Spyware and viruses are so common that you would be hard pressed to find anyone that isn't aware of them. Under the umbrella term Malware, these little programs have been causing trouble for computer users for many years, and they seem to get more powerful everyday. A new incarnation of malware is becoming very common as of late, and it involves using a virus or trojan horse to place a computer under the remote control of a hacker. The controlled computer is referred to as a zombie and it is used to commit various dastardly deeds without the knowledge of the computer owner.

Zombie computers are almost always attached to the Internet via a broadband connection such as DSL or Satellite Internet. This is important as spammers have found that by using zombie computers to send out their junk mail they can easily avoid detection. As of 2005 it was estimated that up to 80% of all spam was sent via zombie computers, and that number is on the rise.

The increase can be attributed to smarter hackers and better technology, but the real driving causes behind the increased zombie trend are better spam filters and anti-spam laws. According to Tom Spring at PC World Magazine, "spammers are hiring virus writers and hackers to help them create armies of zombie PCs to send spam." This union of hackers and spammers has been beneficial to both parties in opening new revenue steams that are extremely difficult to shut down.

Gregg Mastoras, a senior security analyst at the security firm Sophos says, "A new underground economy is evolving." This new economy is for the most part illegal and to date impossible to stop completely.

As of late the Chinese hackers have thrown their hat into the game and have taken the zombie computer business to the next level. Senior Pentagon Advisor Paul Strassmann recently said, "As of September 14th 2007 there were exactly 735,598 computers in the United States infested with Chinese zombies".

Large groups of zombie computers can be used to form a "botnet" or network of slave computers. This network can be used to send out millions of spam mails in a short period of time. Slave networks are also used to commit a DoS attack. DoS attacks, or Denial of Service, target a particular website and overwhelm the server with information requests until the server can no longer handle the load. These attacks or in no way secretive, and once discovered are easily shut down. There will be a period of time however when site traffic will be disrupted by the DoS attack. Larger more sophisticated networks such as those used by governments or large firms have defensive measures in place to prevent damage from a DoS attack.

by Jon T Norwood
Keyword : Zombie Computers Roam The Internet

Try One of These Four Tips to Watch TV On The Computer

Try One of These Four Tips to Watch TV On The Computer

Imagine viewing with your PC the thousands of videos, TV shows and movies that the Internet has to offer. If you have a laptop, then your TV viewing can be done on the go wherever you have access to the Internet.

Things are even more interesting if your Internet connection is wireless. These are just a few of the benefits of watching TV on the computer and this article will give you four tips on how to do this.

1) There is an enormous quantity of classic films, old movies and TV shows as well as documentaries available for you to view in the public domain. When the copyrights of content expire, they are placed in the public domain and can be viewed or even sold by anyone.

Try looking for this material on a search engine using phrases containing 'public domain' plus 'film' or 'video', etc. With just a bit of persistence, some real gems can be uncovered.

2) If you wish to view the shows that your television receives on your monitor, then you may want to purchase and install a TV tuner card in your PC. Many tuner cards will also record television programs into your computer's hard drive for later viewing.

No Internet connection is necessary here since the TV tuner inputs the same signals that your TV set does. If you are looking for quality, you can expect to pay anywhere from $100 to $200.

3) Want to know a guaranteed method of getting DVD quality movies to play on your computer? Just put a DVD into your CD-ROM drive! Before you attempt this, you have to download the right media player with this functionality.

You can download it free at Realplayer.com. Find the yellow 'Get it free' button, click on it and follow instructions. When you're finished with the download and installation, insert a DVD, start the player, open the 'play' menu and click 'Play CD or DVD'.

4) One of the more popular ways to watch TV on the computer involves the use of software that allows you to watch satellite TV over the Internet. Since the TV shows come over the Internet, no satellite dishes or other hardware is required. All that you need is a PC and an Internet connection.

With this software, you will typically have access to more than 3000 channels all over the world . The software prices are between $40 to $100. This is a one time purchase that will set you up for life with no other recurring fees or payments.

Hopefully this article has given you an idea of what's available to you through your PC and its connection to the Internet. The good news is that there is no end in sight to the explosion of Internet TV and video.

by Marc Sandford
Keyword : Watch TV On The Computer

Finding The Best Ergonomic Chair For You

Finding The Best Ergonomic Chair For You

It isn't always easy to find a cheap ergonomic chair or a low cost ergonomic office chair. Incorrect ergonomics can cause back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, headaches, and other medical issues. Whenever people shop for chairs and desks for the home or office, they're not usually looking for something that is good for their bodies, but more about what looks good or is low cost, cheap or what's on sale.

No matter what the task, an ergonomic chair or ergonomic office chair will pay for itself fast due to less pain and increased productivity. The terms computer ergonomics and office ergonomics are often used to mean the same thing; they are usually referring to body-adapted ergonomic chairs, office chairs, stools, desks, keyboards, mice, etc. Try out several chairs at furniture, office supply and back-care stores before you pick the best ergonomic chair for you.

There are some extra large ergonomic chairs that are great for security guards as the size of this chair allows for equipment to be worn on the belt and not to become hooked on the arms of the chair. Fabric selection is important with the ergonomic industrial chair as cleaning may be an issue. For ergonomic industrial chairs and seating the caster selection is particularly important for industrial or manufacturing areas; you'll want a hard floor caster designed for concert floors.

Ergonomic intensive use chairs or seating, also known as 24/7 seating, is for dispatch room security monitoring areas, control rooms, and 911 emergency dispatch offices. Tilt options on the industrial chair mechanisms as well as cylinder height must be considered depending on the job to be handled. Ergonomic intensive use chairs are very durable and especially need to be ergonomic in design, because workers are typically sitting for a lot of hours.

Adequate lumbar support in an ergonomic chair is the most crucial element of a backrest. Look for chairs that provide mid-back and upper-back support as well. The seat should always extend at least one inch from either side of the hips for optimum comfort because insufficient hip room can make you sit too far forward and not get enough thigh support.

Look for an ergonomic chair on wheels that swivels to avoid excess stretching and twisting of your spine and a five-point base won't tip over when you recline. The tilt mechanism maintains support as you move and recline; it's best to have your back slightly reclined while seated at your desk.

The seat pan is the component of the chair that supports the majority of the user's weight. Three or four fingers should fit between the seat pan's front edge and the back of the knees. Tilt adjustments are preferred to allow for a forward working or reclined posture.

Other ergonomic products you can buy include: document holders, ergonomic workstations, telephone mounts, ergonomic keyboards and mouse devices, footrests and speaker stands. It's important to remember that you probably spend a lot of hours on your computer and it's really a long term investment in your health. Hopefully these ergonomic facts and tips about features and types of ergonomic chairs will help you when shopping for or buying an ergonomic chair online or at your local office supply store or office furniture store.

by Helen Hecker
Keyword : The Best Ergonomic

The Truth About SEO And Meta Tags

The Truth About SEO And Meta Tags

In earlier days, when the Internet was still pretty new meta tags were everything. They were vital in helping search engines determine what the site was all about and how to rank the site in their search results. When the databases were smaller and more manageable, this meta tag provided a quick and easy way to figure out which keywords were important on a site. At that time, meta tags were king. Many SEO services could get web sites placed high because of the presence of meta tags.

As the Internet grew larger beyond all expectations, there was fierce competition in trying to get into the search engine's top ranking. SEO services who could not get their sites ranked through fair means resorted to unfair means. In an effort to bring traffic to their site they abused the system by incorporating useless and completely irrelevant keywords into their meta tags.

With the result that today, Google and most other major search engines pay little or no attention to meta tags. What is given more importance is the content within the pages of the site. A few engines still take notice the words within the meta tags, but they are used more as minor supplements to the actual content and title tag of the web page.

So, should you or shouldn't you use meta keyword tags anymore? It certainly couldn't hurt to use it. Search engines use many different factors to determine site rankings, so it makes good sense to use meta tags along with any other acceptable and legitimate technique that is available. At best, it increases your chances of getting a higher ranking and there's no downside to it unless you rampantly stuff your page with irrelevant keywords.

by Gabriel Adams
Keyword : The Truth About SEO And Meta Tags

Website Performance And Load Testing

Website Performance And Load Testing

Your company is rolling out its new web application. This web application is well designed and attractive. It has been well tested by your quality assurance group. You have spent a lot of money marketing your new website. The website now goes live. Very soon you realize that your new web application is unable to scale to your typical production load and the response times and performance reach completely unacceptable levels. Your web logs indicate that most of your website visitors simply leave the new website before buying anything since its response times are very poor. You start to panic, and one of your friends tells you that the reason your application does not perform adequately is that you do not have ample hardware. Hearing this, you decide to add more server hardware. While this has a small effect on the website response time, it is still woefully inadequate. You soon realize that problem does not really lie with the hardware but rather with the web application itself. It appears that your web application was not well optimized for the typical peak loads. It becomes increasingly evident that most of your marketing dollars were wasted.

Enter the world of performance and load testing. In order to ensure that your application scales as the load increases, it is necessary to perform tests where your application is tested against a simulated load that closely resembles the actual load that it will be subjected to when it is exposed to the outside world.

It is important to distinguish between functional or regression testing and load or performance testing. Functional and regression testing is used to automate a large number of scenarios to ensure that your website works as intended. Load testing on the other hand gauges how well your website performs when it is subjected to a large load, such as a large number of simultaneous users.

Load and performance testing require the use of automated testing tools. It is impractical if not ridiculous to try to simulate a load of 200 concurrent users by having a group of 200 folks sit on 200 machines and try to perform operations at the same time. Before you can begin any kind of load and performance testing you will need to identify the test scenarios you need to automate. A load testing tool will typically record web requests and responses based on user interactions with a website. As you perform various operations on your website or application, the tool records all the web transactions that take place. When you finish recording, it generates an automated script. Alternatively you could use the tool to manually create the script. Typically testers will perform a combination of the two. They will use the recording mechanism to generate the skeletal foundations of their scripts and then manually modify the scripts to take into account specialized scenarios. The load testing tool should also allow the tester to simulate constrained bandwidth situations. This means for example that it would accurately model users who would use the application on a slow modem connection. It should also allow the tester to drive the script using random data from large external data sets.

Load testing scripts can be either graphical or textual in nature. Good load and performance testing tools do not require the testers to be programmers. Testers that are not familiar with programming will work with scripts that can be graphically manipulated. Graphical scripts will typically show all recorded steps in the form of a hierarchical structure and testers would modify any of the steps in order to modify the recorded script. Testers who are proficient in programming may want to manipulate their scripts by editing the code. These testers would work with code written in a well known programming language such as JavaScript, VBScript or C.

Once your script has been created, you may wish to put specialized checks in place. These checks would typically be related specifically to the application under test. For example you may wish to check that the response returned by a certain web request meets certain textual criteria. This would involve the placement of a text checkpoint. A text checkpoint can verify that a given text segment is present or is not present in a specified portion of the web page. Once you have finished the creation of the script you would typically test the script on your own machine as a single user to ensure that the test script runs as intended.

You are now ready to perform a performance based load test. A good load testing tool will allow the tester to fine tune the execution of the test. This means that it will allow the tester to choose the number of concurrent virtual users, how the script ramps up, how it ramps down and for how long it runs. It should also allow the tester to create various groups of concurrent virtual users that have their own ramp up, steady state and ramp down characteristics. A good testing tool will allow the user to distribute this load over several machines since a single machine may be only able to scale up to a few hundred users.

To understand the behavior of the loaded web application, it is also important for the load testing tool to enable the tester to track the performance characteristics of external components such as operating systems, web servers, databases etc. This allows the user to see how the performance of his application correlates with the performance characteristics of the external component. This kind of analysis will allow the tester to pinpoint the root cause of performance bottlenecks fairly easily.

During test execution the tester should be able to view the performance graphs in real time for performance metrics such as the transaction response time, HTTP responses per second grouped by HTTP code (e.g. 200, 404, 500 etc), passed transactions per second, failed transactions per second, total transactions per second, hits per second, pages downloaded per second etc. The tester should also be able to simultaneously view the performance characteristics of the external components described above. For an operating system this could be something like the % processor time, for a database it could be the number of writes per second. At the end of the test, the tester would typically be able to view and save this data as a report for further analysis.

Load and performance testing allow you to simulate the behavior of your application under a typical production environment. This will allow you to plan your hardware deployment strategy effectively and ensure that your application will deliver the expected performance characteristics. Rolling out a web application without testing its performance characteristics under expected production loads would resemble crossing a road blindfolded. Load testing is an essential part of the development cycle of a web application and should never be overlooked.

by Umair Khan
Keyword : Website Performance And Load Testing

Trusting Digital Reviews

Trusting Digital Reviews

Digital camera reviews are abundant not just online but also in the newspapers, magazines and even TV shows. We often wonder why most digital camera reviews always praise all the digital camera out in the market, that's why we end up getting confused on which product to buy or get our loved ones.

Here's one thing you should never trust regarding digital camera reviews - never trust press releases or reviews that are directly from the manufacturer or advertising office that is directly connected with producer of the digital camera. Why?! Well because these digital camera reviews are never too truthful, or they just give out the good points about their products. I mean, what would you expect, supposing you own your own line of digital cameras and to boost your sales, you release digital camera reviews about your products. Of course you wouldn't point out the bad things or the glitches of your product in your digital camera reviews, because that way you will never be able to shoot up your sales. Press releases or digital camera reviews from manufacturer are always half-truths. Haven't you had any experience with that?! I mean, that just doesn't go for digital camera, remember that brush-blower thingy that you bought over the internet that says it would work tremendously for your hair, but ended not working for your hair after all. Press releases are press releases, meaning that they are aimed to get people to buy the product or to give the product a better name. One more thing that you can never fully trust are home shopping networks and advertisements. As much as press releases, they pretty much pose the same claims about their products. But hey, don't trust me, you can always get them and return them after proving to yourself that it doesn't work. Never mind the time and effort that you've wasted, you chose to listen to a half-truth digital camera review, that's what you get for that.

The best digital camera reviews available are those found in specialty magazines (computer based and technical magazines), special websites catering to techie stuff and unofficial digital camera reviews. Why?! Well because! Because these digital camera reviews are always truthful. These reviewers and critics are never afraid to list down the good as much as the bad points of digital cameras. These digital camera reviews usually points out the difference between the products that a certain manufacturer has released and how it is worse or better than the previous one. These reviewers and critics are also knowledgeable in their craft, so its say to safe to say that they know what they are talking about when it comes to digital camera reviews. One more thing, most of the time, these digital camera reviews are actual first hand experience with the product itself and not just some advertising agent asked to come up with flowery words to capture you and your wallet.

Another best source for a digital camera review is one that you can write yourself. And how can you do that?! Of course, you first need to buy your own digital camera, try it out and compare everything that you do with it to the things that it claims to be. (be careful to read the specs, options and features that you need to try out, be on the lookout for words such as weatherproof, meaning that they are splash resistant as to waterproof that are water resistant. You don't want to get your newly bought weatherproof camera wet, just to prove to yourself that the things they claim are not true). After doing so, then you can write your own digital camera review or reviews, depending on how many things you've learned from your digital camera. Be sure to indicate that your review is an on-hand experience with the product and not just some wild guess.

by Montydirect.com
Keyword : Trusting Digital Reviews