Discount Computers

Right now you probably in a lot of mental pain, and all you’re
concerned about is recovering your data as quickly as possible -
so we’ll refrain from comments on the wisdom of regular back
ups. The time for preventative measures has gone – the issue at
hand is data recovery.

First – a simple tip could save you a lot of money. Take out
your rolodex and get hold of your tech-savvy friends. If you’re
in luck, they’ll offer to help, and if you’re really lucky, they
might even have some disk recovery software.

If you’re out of luck, then get out your wallet or purse out now
… because this is going to cost you. Also, be prepared for a lot
of time being wasted – data recovery can take a long time.

The first thing to establish is what exactly is wrong with your
hard disk:

• Either your computer won’t boot
  up, or
• Your computer boots up OK but you can’t
  see one of your other drives.

Let’s see if we can eliminate the worst scenario. Listen closely
to your hard drive – is it making any sort of weird noise, such
as scratching, scraping, ticking etc?

If so, then your drive is physically damaged and the only hope
that you have is to take it to a data recovery service where
experts might be able to get your data off for you. These
services are expensive and time consuming – so you need to make
a judgement call as to the value of data on the
disk.

• If it’s only your saved game data or downloaded
  music files you would like back, you’re probably better off
  kicking yourself for not backing up, and accepting the data
  loss.
• If, on the other hand, it’s a book or other type
  of information product that you’ve been working on for years,
  then send it to a data recovery service for an evaluation and
  quote – it usually costs nothing.

If your hard disk sounds OK, then you stand a decent
chance of recovering data yourself.

First you’ll need to download some software to help you out.
Unfortunately, the better software utilities are not free, but
the good news is that many allow you to try them out to see they
can access the data. There are some freeware versions available
but generally speaking these are not easy to use – no user
interface / little documentation, or they are not very
effective.

There’s a list of recommended software on our site ‘Data
Recovery Emergency Room’ – compare the different options
then download a few of the trial versions.

Your next steps will be based on how your hard drive/s were
setup:

• If you only have a single hard drive that has
  not been partitioned or split into different “logical” drives,
  you’ll probably need to attach the hard drive to another
  computer that has enough space to store all your data. This can
  be quite technical so if you don’t have the skills please get a
  computer savvy friend to help out.

  Another option is to purchase an external USB hard drive case.
  You can then simply slot the hard drive into the case and plug
  it into another PC using a USB port.

• If you have a multiple drive setup and your computer
  boots up fine, then it will merely be a case of getting the
  downloaded software to read the files and then copy them to
  another drive – provided you have a drive with enough space on
  it. If not, you’ll need to attach the hard drive to another
  machine with enough spare capacity.
• The scenario
  where you have a multiple drive setup, where the problem drive
  is the one that contains your operating system files is more
  tricky.

  Look for a data recovery software package that has a boot disk
  option available. What this means is that when you start your
  computer with the boot disk in it, it will automatically run the
  data recovery program without trying to start windows. You
  should be able to see your files and then copy them across to
  another drive.

Hopefully these tips will enable you to get all your
important files back.

Once you’ve had some time to recover, please take a look at the
various articles on our website – our goal is to make it one of
the best resources on data recovery.

About the author:

For the past 20 years, Jeff Walters\’ interest has been in making
the most effective use of a business\’s information assets. He
has lead several data-to-information projects : ABC Costing,
analytical CRM, data warehouse development.

For more
info, visit:

Data Recovery
CRM

10 Things To Know BEFORE Hiring A Freelance Programmer by Robert
Plank

To avoid the same mistakes I see marketers making over and over
again, there are a few things you need to know before you hire
that eLance, Scriptlance, or RentACoder software developer.

Law 1: Your software needs to be created in small steps.

It\’s more expensive that way, but at least you can get your
version 1.0 out with the basic features. Once you have that base
just pay the programmer on a case-by-case basis depending on
which SMALL feature you want to add.

Get your version 1.0 working, fully error-free, tested, and
SELLING with the site live before adding features for version
1.1, 1.2, 2.0, etc. When you move on to these newer versions
make sure it is all error free and selling on your site before
continuing.

After the initial version has been written you will know exactly
what you\’re paying for.

Keeping it simple allows you to be very specific about what you
want your script to do without overloading the programmer with
details.

Small steps also mean any changes to your software project will
happen fairly quickly. If they don\’t, you can ditch an
unreliable programmer without losing months of time.

Law 2: Programming will cost you money.

Every once in a while some guy I used to do programming for but
haven\’t had time for in a while tells me about a programmer in
India, or Russia or some other place who spent a day writing a
script and it all cost him a grand total of… 6 dollars.

Then I take a look at the script and it looks like about $6
worth of work to me.

There is no reason to go ultra-cheap on the money you put into
creating your software product. Your only expense is the cost of
having it developed, everything after that is pure profit.

A (print) book publisher will pay an ex-President millions of
dollars for a ghostwriter to produce an autobiography, because
once the actual text is written, the publishing company can
start manufacturing books for a dollar or two and sell it at
$29.95. It\’s the same idea here, most of the expenses will come
now instead of later.

Law 3: Most programmers know \”diddly\” about marketing.

Sorry. It\’s just a fact. Most of these guys have been creating
the exact same script over and over… usually bad ones like a
traffic exchange or dating script. Be patient and explain
split-testing, double opt-in or whatever needs to be explained
and if the programmer can\’t understand those concepts just go
with someone else.

Law 4: The code needs to be well documented (comments in the
code), that way you can come back to it.

If you find a problem with your program a year from now, even
the original programmer will be clueless UNLESS there are
comments within the source code explaining very clearly what
every function and block of code is supposed to do.

Law 5: Your programmers need to speak decent English.

Not that Indian dialect of English either, real English. This is
definitely not the time to lose anything in translation. Plus if
everything\’s in another language how can you possibly switch to
another programmer if you need to later?

Law 6: You will almost always catch stuff the programmer didn\’t.

There is a real thing called Programmer\’s Immunity. Basically it
says that the \”average\” user will have more computer problems
than a programmer, because a programmer is used to making things
work (work-arounds). This means every once in a while, your
programmer will subconsciously miss bugs that are glaringly
obvious to you.

Don\’t get annoyed, just let the programmer know about the
problem, and what exact steps need to be performed to reproduce
the error.

You will need to test the program yourself. You will also need
to send the program out to beta testers to make sure others can
use the software without problems AND you need to find out if
the program can be used without instructions by someone who has
never seen the software before.

The installation instructions need to be worded as simply as
possible, without a lot of legalese or technical terms.

Law 7: (For web-based apps) use HTML templates.

Most programmers I\’ve seen are shitty designers. This way you
can change the way the script appears and even hire out a
professional designer.

You need the programmer to use a very simple template system.

In PHP this would be something like FastTemplate, where there is
a simple \”tag\” in the HTML like {firstName} or %firstName%.
There are other bad template scripts for PHP such as Smarty,
which sucks because it embeds PHP code in the templates. You\’d
have the same problem using regular PHP. The whole point of
having templates are to separate the code from the appearance.

Law 8: If you can afford it, get a code inspector.

This is a programmer you know to be good but maybe too expensive
to write the entire script, who can take a quick look at the
code after every release to make sure the program is \”good
enough\” … not perfect but sellable.

Your inspector is only looking for HUGE problems in the program
or script like the usage of gotos or globals, or maybe your
freelancer is using a database but hasn\’t normalized it properly
or forgot to add indeces where they are needed to keep the
database fast.

Law 9: Stay away from GPL, open source, and re-used code AT ALL
COSTS!

This is a biggie. Make it clear you do not want code reused from
other scripts. Obviously if the coder uses parts of someone
else\’s script you are in violation of copyright laws.

On the other hand there is free software out there called GPL
(GNU Public License) which is free to use but only if you make
the source code of your entire software product available as
well. That is definitely NOT what you want.

Law 10: Your software will break over time.

This is just a fact. If you\’re having some desktop software
created in C++ the code might not compile correctly on a
different compiler in a few years. Some software written in
version 1.0 of Microsoft\’s .NET runtime already breaks when you
run it on computers with version 1.1 (argh!)

Don\’t even get me started about PHP. When PHP releases new
versions the new ways of doing things are not always backwards
compatible. Depending on which modules or security patches a
given web host has installed, certain functions may not work as
well. You just have to test, that\’s life.

About the author:
Check out Robert Plank\’s e-book, Sales Page Tactics
http://www.salespagetactics.com/Your_Clickbank_ID … For a ton
of PHP advice and easy fixes to your marketing problems.

Publish me!! This article may be freely distributed as long as
the whole thing (including this notice) remain intact.

Laptops are always a difficult thing to buy because there is
such a wide choice and so many different prices and then there\’s
the technical specifications to get your head around.. nightmare!

So here\’s some ideas from the technical side of things, these
are the main things that you want to think about:

Disk Drive ———– Usually referred to as \’HDD\’ (hard disk
drive). This is where all your stuff is stored – emails, office
documents, photos, music, movies etc and of course all your
software and applications. Their size is always measured in
Gigabytes (or GB). To decide what size you need, you should
consider what sort of stuff you are saving on your computer. If
you use loads of images, movies and lots of music (in itunes, or
as mp3s or in your \’share\’ folders if you\’re into p2p
filesharing), you should consider getting a larger disk say
80-100 GB. If however you just want to use your laptop for
sending and receiving emails, surfing the world wide web,
writing word and excel documents and watching DVD\’s, then the
disk space isn\’t going to be so critical. I usually have 40GB
and find that\’s plenty. You might even be fine with 30GB, but I
vertainly wouldn\’t go any lower than that.

Processor ——— Often referred to as the CPU (central
processing unit). This is the bit which actually processes all
the instructions within the machine and makes things work. It\’s
just a chip about the size of a two pound coin, which sits on
the main board inside the computer. The speed of the chip is
measured in MHz (megahertz, or millions of cycles per second).
Some fall into the \’thousands of megahertz\’ category and are
hence specified in GHz (gigahertz – that\’s one thousand MHz).
The two main chip manufacturers are Intel and AMD. For laptops,
I would recommend an Intel processor, just because they perform
better under hot conditions (laptops do get very hot). Intel
processors these days also come with the added advantage of
\’Centrino\’ technology. This is useful, because it allows you to
connect to wireless networks. I find that\’s really handy,
because I have a wireless network in my house and I can connect
to the internet anywhere in the building from my laptop without
having to use any cables. Another thing to look out for when
choosing a laptop. One other thing to look out for when choosing
the processor is the Pentium \’M\’ range. If you see Pentium M,
that\’s a good thing. It means that Intel have optimised the
processor for \’mobile\’ use, so it remains cool and doesn\’t go
bezurk when you\’re watching your favourite DVD. Aim for 2GHz if
you can. Don\’t go below 1.2 GHz.

RAM (Memory) ———— RAM – that\’s Random Accecss Memory has
a direct effect on the ability of your computer to do it\’s work.
Whenever a program is run, that whole program is loaded into
this area of memory – any documents you have open, any proccess
that you have running – they are all loaded off the Hard disk
into memory and then handled by the CPU. The implication here is
that the less memory you have, the fewer programs and documents
you can have open before the computer keels over. If you have
loads and loads of memory, then your machine can handle loads of
application windows and documents without any performance
degradation. When your machine finally runs out of memory it
starts using swap-space – that\’s a bit of the hard disk which
has been put aside and is used as an extra bit of memory for
when you\’ve rum out of RAM. You can always tell when your
machine has run out of memory, because it slows down to a
snail\’s pace, and your HDD activity light goes mad – that\’s
because it\’s \’swapping\’ between RAM and swap-space on disk. RAM
is measured in MB (megabytes), but sometimes is quoted in GB
(Gigabytes – thousands of MB). So how much ram do you need? The
laptop I\’m using right now has 1GB of RAM. I never require any
more than that. I can watch movies, use the web, edit pictures
and do all the normal stuff I want. 1GB is plenty. You\’ll
probably find that 500MB (or 1/2 GB) is also sufficient. It
really depends on what you can afford.

VIDEO – Graphics —————- Yeah, this bit gets confusing,
because suddenly you find all the above parameters being
described all over again but just in a video context. Video
stuff is handled by a separate piece of hardware called the
\’video card\’. This card usually has it\’s own RAM, it\’s own
processor, sometimes even its own heatsink and fan. The
important thing with video is to ensure that you have enough
Memory (video RAM) to handle your DVD\’s and movies. If your
Video RAM is too low, you will find that it buffers to slowly
when you\’re watching you films and that causes jerkiness and
spoils the picture. So try to aim for as much video RAM as you
can afford. 64MB is usually okay. If you can afford more, then
go for it. One warning – some motherboards have all the video
capability \’on board\’, which isn\’t necessarily a problem, but
sometimes the video hardware borrows from your system RAM, which
means that if you have 64 MB of video RAM, that might impact
directly on your system RAM (to the tune of 64 MB). I once got
caught out by this and ended up with a laptop which was
significantly under-powered especially when it was processing
graphical stuff – even Flash movies killed it horribly.

Other stuff ———– These days a floppy drive isn\’t usually
necessary – we have enough means for transferring files over the
internet for floppy drives to be pretty much obsolete these days.

Most manufacturers offer a 3-year onsite warrenty. This is
definitely a good thing to get. If your computer goes wrong and
you can\’t fix it, you\’ll really wish that a nice man will just
turn up and make everything better again.

Case – is handy if you want to carry your laptop around,
otherwise don\’t worry about it. You might even be able to buy a
second hand laptop case, or even make one of your own.

Power supply – if you use your laptop regularly in two locations
(I use mine at home and at work), it\’s handy to have two power
adaptors – one at each location, so that you don\’t have to carry
it around all the time and also so that you don\’t get caught out
on the days when you forget to take the adaptor with you.

PCMCIA – this is the wide, flat-shaped slot on the side of your
laptop which is used for plugging in extra cards – most commonly
this is used for adding a network card, or a wireless card. If
you have built in wireless capability, then an extra PCMCIA slot
won\’t be so critical. If your laptop doesn\’t have built in
wireless be sure that it does have a PCMCIA slot so that you can
plug a wifi card into the side.

There are loads of other things to consider such as size and
weight, but these are the main things that I can think of for
now.

christo

About the author:
http://www.spiration.co.uk