In the “it never happens to me” series, it did happen to me. Recently my laptop’s hard drives crashed/died and the data I had on it, was crucial. First thing I did was to panic and then I had to find online, a company that would help me recover everything.

After a few hours of search, I decided to leave data recovery to DTI Data. They seemed to be the most professional and the fact that they are one of the only companies to offer free upfront flat rate price quotes on single hard drive data recovery was a big plus for me. But a fair price wasn’t the only thing I had in my mind. Another reason I was lured to go with DTI Data was because of the data guarantee; don’t pay unless they recover the lost data.

DTI Data has a biometrically secure (class 100) clean rooms, is authorized by all major hard disk manufacturers and is experienced with recovering data from your laptop or PC hard drive and ca even assist you with DIY Data Recovery Software and file undelete tools. They can also do raid data recovery for larger corporations or home grown businesses. From what I’ve been told all software they have was built in house, so I guess these guys are really good.

They also maintain a data recovery blog, to publish articles with tips and tricks on how to recover data by yourself or how to preserve your data. This is where I learned that chkdsk is not a recovery tool and you shouldn’t run it, that heat plays a major role when it comes to the destructions of hard drives, memory or CPU and that dust causes poor connectivity and restricts the air flow.

The full list of services includes:

• hard drive recovery
• data recovery services
• data recovery software
• RAID data recovery
• Exchange server recovery
• SCSI hard drive data recovery
• and other specific data recovery needs.

DTI Data did a great job with my laptop hard drive so I guess this is why this article. I’m very happy that I paid a fair price and I got all my data back in a very short period of time. If you needed one more thing to convince you that these guys are good at what they do, you should know that since 1992 they had over 100,000 clients and NASA’s quote “Lockhead Martin referred us” is a very big plus.

The new contest from Microsoft to evaluate Windows Server 2008 is offering Windows Home Server as a prize and now that we mentioned it, I thought of giving some heads up on what (I’ve heard) to be the next major upgrade for WHS.

Windows Home Serve Vail is going to be the name, rumors say, and the most important thing is that it comes with more entertainment capabilities. Before Vail is coming to the market Microsoft needs to fix a data corruption bug that has been affecting third party applications.

We hope to get more info about it soon, because right now we can only speculate.

via Zdnet

Big announcement guys and gals. Microsoft is offering incentives to people that have the time to evaluate (evalu’08) the new Microsoft Server products that were recently released in Los Angeles. The prize is a Windows Home Server. But wait, this is not for all of us. Only  18+ years old  residents of the United States with an IT or software development role will be allowed to sign up.

Go ahead and read the official rules and keep in mind that sweepstakes ends June 30, 2008.

via wegotserved

The web browser pioneer, Netscape Navigator was sentenced to die. AOL announced that the official support for Netscape Navigator will be stopped starting from March 1st. I remember myself when I first used the Internet. Netscape was the favorite browser back then. Although, the bad marketing and the strong competitor Internet Explorer have lowered its market share.

Nowadays, Netscape has only 0.61% of the market. When its decline was obvious, the company opened its source code, making it available for developers. So, the Mozilla project appeared and today’s popular Firefox. In spite of being acquired by AOL in 1998, Netscape remained in obscurity. It had troubles with security patches and bug fixes, so the web surfers forgot it.

If you still planing to use Netscape Navigator, you should perhaps switch to Firefox and add an extension for Netscape. For now I will just say “RIP Netscape Navigator…”

via Gearater

Texas Instruments already presented a testing platform for Android earlier this week, but the big news came in today. Apparently TI already has a development platform ready to run and is close to the stage where they ship to developers.

So, if you are a programmer and you want to help us improve the “world” (of cellphones) you may want to consider Texas Instruments’ Android development platform. It runs on OMAP 3430 CPU at 600 Mhz, has 720p video output and costs less than $1k from what I’ve heard.

via Engadget

There is so much to tell about Android, but I will be short about it. First of all, you should know that Android is an Open Handset Alliance Project started by Google Inc.

More about the Android Project are said in the video below:

The Android Developer Challenge intends to encourage developers to built useful apps in the following areas of interest:

• Social networking
• Media consumption, management, editing, or sharing, e.g., photos
• Productivity and collaboration such as email, IM, calendar, etc.
• Gaming
• News and information
• Rethinking of traditional user interfaces
• Use of mash-up functionality
• Use of location-based services
• Humanitarian benefits
• Applications in service of global economic development
• Whatever you’re excited about!

The most suitable apps will receive a prize too. The Android Developer Challenge will award $10 million to developers who build great apps for Android. So, the race sounds to be very hard. The team has extended the submission deadline to 14 April 2008. The 50 most promising entries received by April 14 will be rewarded with $25,000. Furthermore the selected will then be eligible for even greater recognition via ten $275,000 awards and ten $100,000 awards.

Based on the feedback from developers, a new SDK version will be released in the next weeks. According to Android blog, the new SDK will feature UI and API enhancements. Thus, the deadline has been moved to April. Here are the scheduled activities for Android Developer Challenge:

• April 14, 2008: Deadline to submit applications for judging
• May 5, 2008: Announcement of the 50 first round winners, who will be eligible for the final round
• June 30, 2008: Deadline for the 50 winners of the first round to submit for the final round
• July 21, 2008: Announcement of the grand prize winner and runner-up

via Android’s Website

Linux for mobile phones is a good alternative to Windows Mobile, but it didn’t have success yet. The problem encountered by mobile manufacturers was integrating the software. That happened because some companies made Linux kernels, while others provided application development environments. So, the phone makers struggled to integrate the components and finally chose the convenient Windows Mobile.

Azingo, a software company, promises a complete suite of mobile Linux software and furthermore intends to help the producers to integrate the components I was telling you about. Azingo’s application offers Web widgets that can deliver information such as weather and traffic, entertainment applications and productivity software. It sounds very nice to me!

Currently there are no deals with phone manufacturers, but Azingo has announced that handsets using their software will be available in the fourth quarter.

via Yahoo News

Now that Microsoft announced they will start working on the 7th Windows operating system, dubbed Vienna, we managed to get a look on it’s going to look. This are supposed to be Windows Vienna screenshots which, to be honest, doesn’t look more than a modified Vista. I cannot guarantee you that these are real, but they could be.

Here is the video

via ThinkNext

If you haven’t heard yet Google Docs and Google Calendar were released on cellphones some time ago with the main target, iPhone owners. With such a big market (lots of units sold) and users that loves the brand with a clean and simple application Google just optimized more of their mobile solutions for the iPhone.

The new Google homepage is now updated with a tabbed bar on top that can easily send you to Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Reader and their other mobile applications. It doesn’t look like the Android but it’s still something that will win a lot of people.

via GoPaulTech

One year ago we asked ourselves if we got our eyes on a GooglePhone but I guess we all knew Google was not doing a race to produce the actual device because they would make more money by releasing their own OS with preinstalled applications.

Now we’re living in the world of the Android, which is Google’s project for the mobile phones operating system and here is the first virtual tour. Thanks to the OS emulator that was included with SDK, Engadget managed to put their fingers at work to see what we should expect from Android, in order to prepare the open source community for what will come. It looks nice so give it a shot. Here’s a small gallery bellow.