The advantages of the Google Drive are obvious. If you own a tablet, a smartphone and a laptop, and perhaps travel to remote sites where you are working on other systems as well, it’s very convenient to be able to access data across multiple devices. You won’t need to sync multiple systems to play a favorite song or look at the latest pictures your kids sent you of their new puppy. You can work on a document on a tablet as you are traveling, store it on the cloud, and then access it on your laptop from your hotel. If you are a fairly unsophisticated user and your Internet use is primarily recreational, Google Drive is quite attractive. On the other hand, for mission critical business tasks, there are several concerns likely to make Google Drive slightly less appealing.

The first major concern is Google itself. Although founded with the motto “Don’t be evil,” the company has been involved in several high profile scandals and lawsuits recently concerning misuse of private data. Using Google Drive requires that you trust Google with sensitive proprietary information. Even if you do trust Google implicitly, if your business data includes private information of customers, you should be concerned about whether uploading that information to Google drive violates data privacy regulations, especially in the European Union, which is imposing increasingly strict controls on the use of identifiable data from its citizens.

The next major concern that Google Drive should raise is that you are essentially outsourcing responsibility for data integrity, data security, data privacy and data backup to a consumer rather than business-oriented system. Given that so much of your business value lies in your data, you may need more sophisticated data management tools, especially if you have data sets being updated from multiple sources and you need to validate and sequence data updates in particular ways. You also, both for data security and regulatory reasons, need to be making multi-generational backups or developing customized applications in the cloud, a service provided by more sophisticated systems like VMWare’s vCloud API.

Finally, as you virtualize your computing environment and move it to the cloud, as many companies are doing, you do not want to lose the investment you have made in developing software and applications. With a more sophisticated virtualized system, you can move all of your data and applications to the cloud seamlessly, taking advantage of all the protocols, procedures, and programs your business has developed over the years, rather than being forced to use a limited selection of software and interfaces in an environment entirely controlled by Google.

While Google Drive really is a great place to store your music collection and photos, most businesses still need to look beyond Google for mission critical cloud computing.

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Remote Access Servers 101: What They Are & Why They Matter

· What are they? – Remote access server technology is nothing new. In very basic language, a remote access server is a server not located on a physical or local computer. In most cases, a remote access server is run externally from an external computer or group of computers sharing computing resources among each other. The big idea when it comes to remote access servers is that they enable you to access data from any computer where you’re able to log into the remote server’s administrative settings. In many cases, or depending on the size and type of an organization, remote access servers are part of large virtual private networks (VPNs), which allow users to manage servers, launch applications and manage tasks from any type of computer.

· Why do they matter? – For any business or organization relying on large sets of data that must change multiple hands within a workflow, access is a key component of any infrastructural system. Take the simple act of downloading a file for instance. Say you’re in the middle of downloading an important file, app or document and the connection is either running slow, or you’re in a hurry to be somewhere else. Within the remote access framework, you can simply pause the download, log out of your server and then continue the download elsewhere.

Some large-scale hosting providers have even cobbled together powerful smartphone applications that allows possible for cloud server administrators to remotely manage and administer server processes from nearly anywhere in the world.

Two Powerful Remote Server Management Apps

1. Rackspace – The latest version release of the Rackspace Hosting application lets a specific user log into the Rackspace platform, and manage, resize and build new cloud servers right from the application itself. In most cases, new cloud servers can be created from backups of the main servers. The app can also perform both hard and soft reboots, and delete active servers. As is normally the case with all things Rackspace, the app is open-source. If you’re looking to fuel the app developer deep within, simply download the source code and begin contributing to the app.

2. Desktop Connect – While Desktop Connect isn’t necessarily an official Windows Server client, it is a way to connect to your Windows servers remotely with an iOS application. Using the iOS app is simple enough. Start by opening the app; create a profile for the Windows server you want to log into; then enter the IP address as well as any other login credentials to connect to the server. For the Windows IT professionals looking to shed a bulky laptop and manage remote servers comfortably, this may just be the perfect option.

Going Mobile Equals Staying Relevant

Smart phones, tablet PCs and other mobile devices have paved a way for remote access server management to become more…um…remote. In the future it’s likely there will be a major insurgence of cloud server providers that step into the mobile app development space.

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Disk fragmentation is an age-old concern that has probably plagued each one of us. This problem is undoubtedly a huge worry for those who work in the most demanding business environments that require both performance and productivity. Mac users storing huge volumes of data on their drives face two types of fragmentation, i.e. file fragmentation and free space fragmentation. File fragmentation is a condition where a single file is broken into fragments and then those fragments are stored in various scattered areas on your drive. OS X is pretty good at defragging the files that are less than 20 MB and have more than eight fragments. On the other hand, free space fragmentation is caused due to frequent deletion or truncation of files. When portions of  free space are scattered all over your drive, the new large files that are created also get fragmented.

Mac OS X takes care of this problem by incorporating various built-in safeguards. The Mac HFS+ file system tries to find larger portions of free space on your drive and stores the newly created files at these locations to prevent fragmentation. This ensures that all the recently freed file space is not used while writing new data to the disk. Moreover, the file system follows a practice of accumulating small-sized files in various groups and then storing them together on a larger disk area. Another technique that helps to counter fragmentation is ‘Hot File Adaptive Clustering’. The file system creates a special area called ‘Hot Zone’ on your drive that stores all your frequently-accessed data and programs. In the process, these files get fragmented and saved to a location with the fastest access.

File system fragmentation causes performance implications and other issues. This indeed is a threat to your system reliability, as it results in slow boot-up times, slow shutdown times, slow application response times, and system crashes. There is a range of third-party drive defrag for Mac utilities on the market. These software are more robust and reliable. They use dedicated, proprietary mechanisms to carry out defragmentation on your Mac boot volume or other secondary volumes. These software can show you the allocation of your hard drive space into various levels, such as Allocation, Overflow, Catalog, Attribute, Fragmented, Data, and Unused Space. They enable you to perform full defragmentation of your drive in one go. Furthermore, they support all the latest Mac OS X versions, including Mac OS X Lion, along with 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.5 Leopard, and 10.4 Tiger.

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Stuck in Hard Disk Drive Hell! 185/366 (Photo credit: Mr Munnings on Tour)

Every computer user will definitely take the name; ‘Hard Drive’, loud and clear. Except a few, almost all computers have one or more hard drives in them. Hard drive acts as the primary data storage media and whatever data is processed gets stored in those hard disk drives. Thus, any problem to the hard drive makes the data in it completely inaccessible. However, with the help of advanced hard drive data recovery techniques, now it is possible to recover lost, deleted, formatted, or inaccessible data from your hard drive.

In the current computer world, there are different types storage media available, including internal hard drives, external drives, USB drives, SSD, CD, DVD, Blu-ray discs etc. These available media types vary with respect to their data storage capacity as well as storage architecture. Still, hard drive is the one that is commonly used.

Whether laptops or desktop computers, the internal hard disks are the major data storage media for most of the computer users. Even the users, who store data in some media other than their system hard disk, store backup data in external hard drives. Except for few occasions of using CD/DVD discs, hard drives store the first copy of data, even before copying them to some other form of media.

During the initial days of computer usage, the requirement was high capacity storage media. But, gradually users understood the importance of data and the priority goes onto reliability rather than just high data storage capacity. With time, the storage architecture of hard drive has also gradually improved and reached to its toady’s form.

But, there are a number of instances, following which precious data in the hard drive either gets lost or becomes inaccessible. Below are some of the prominent causes behind data loss from hard drive:

• Accidental or intentional formatting of the hard drive
• Severe file system corruption
• Virus or malware infection making the hard drive unbootable
• Corruption to the operating system
• Contradiction with newly installed software or hardware

   

After encountering any of the above situations, if your data in the hard drive becomes inaccessible, you can take the help of any hard drive data recovery software to bring back your precious data. These hard drive recovery software are programmed with powerful algorithms to recover all data that has been lost, deleted, or formatted. Moreover, these data recovery software are completely reliable and quite easy-to-use with interactive graphical user interfaces.

Related articles

• Simple steps to recover deleted data from empty trash-bin folder(savagenomads.net)

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The Dell thin client and you, is quite an important thing to consider. While most people don’t know what a thin client is, or why it is they may benefit from using a thin client instead of a standard computer, once they have tried out a Dell thin client or a thin client in general, they may very well scrap their standard computer for good.

Thin clients allow computation and file work to be done all in one centralized application server, which allows for different points of access. They are ideal for schools, healthcare centers, call centers, and anytime where desktop access is controlled.

Thin clients allow the control of access to shared application licenses. Some of the different types of shared applications that they can help to secure are:

• Adobe Premire
• AutoCAD
• Wolfram Mathmatica 7
• Mathworks Matlab
• SAS
• IBM SPSS

These of course aren’t the only applications that administrators will have the ability to control. In fact, they can control just about any aspect of the shared environment among computer networks. These of course go hand in hand with systems such as a Dell HPC (High performance computing). With many different kinds of solutions, these two pieces of hardware can work in tandem to create a safe and easy to use computer network for everyone.

There are however, a few things that everyone should be aware of. A poor thin client can cause major problems. It is absolutely necessary that anyone who wishes to install a thin client to do their homework. Always select a top of the line thin client, or one that is being marketed by companies that you trust.

Being prepared with knowledge of thin clients will only help you to select the right one for an at home or business environment, ensuring that it will be bug-free and easy to use for a very long time.

Another thing that companies need to know is the protocols that are most commonly used with a thin client. These are:

• Appliance Link Protocol
• NFS
• Citrix ICA
• Remote Desktop Protocol
• Secure Shell (SSH)
• Virtual Network Computing
• X11 (Central Unix windowing)
• XML, HTML, or JSON

As with any other technology, thin clients are getting smaller. You can either choose a standard thin client or an ultra-thin client that no longer runs a full operating system at all. Instead, it relies on the networking protocol that handles the display of the server’s output.

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However, if the file size is too big for the trash bin or by selecting the command ‘Command+Shift+Option+Delete’, then the files without moving to the trash bin get entirely deleted from the Mac hard disk drive. Not only this, when user choose the command ‘Empty Trash‘ from the finder, data gets completely deleted. In both the cases, the data is gone for ever from the Mac HDD and if by chance you have mistakenly deleted an important file without which your work would come to a halt, then its time now to launch a data recovery operation on your Mac.

As a Mac does not have any in-built feature which brings back files emptied from the trash bin, one needs to take help of a file recovery tool for Mac. To begin with,

1.      Purchase a trusted 3rd party Mac file recovery tool and install on your Mac.

2.      Run the file recovery tool & click the Deleted File Recovery feature.

3.      Select the volume or entire hard drive through the interface and begin scanning the media.

4.      The recovery tool scans the selected volume and lists all the recoverable deleted data.

5.      Choose the files, you want to recover and click the ‘Recover’ button.

6.      The recovery software will ask for a specified location to save the recovered files.

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Skype

Although Skype may not be the absolute best as far as software is concerned, it is by far the best to communicate with because of its popularity. Nearly everyone is familiar with Skype, making it incredibly easy to get into contact with friends and family.

Fring

Fring is a video chat app that will allow you to chat via a wifi connection. The best thing about this app is that it is easy to you and you can communicate with friends and family whether they have an Android or Apple phone.

Viber

With Viber no account or cash is needed to use the VoIP. All you have to do is make sure that whoever you are calling using Viber also has an account – otherwise it will cost you minutes.

iCall

Not only is iCall free, but it allows free calling to the US and Canada and gives you notifications when you receive incoming calls. If you’re willing to pay for the service, you can get it ad free and make relatively cheap international cars.

TruPhone

TruPhone definitely comes at a steeper price, $12.95 a month, but the service it offers is a little more advanced than other free services. With TruPhone you can make unlimited calls to 38 countries and to cell phones in 9. You are also able to call other users with TruPhone, Skype, and Gtalk.

While more advanced services used on computers, such as MegaPath hosted VoIP, offer much better VoIP than apps do, mobile apps have come a long way. So if you are looking for a great way to save minutes yet still be able to speak with friends and family, check out the various VoIP services available through your appstore.

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The Galaxy S2, Samsung’s leading Android smartphone of 2011, is about to take a back seat with the impending release of the sensational Samsung Galaxy S3!  An official statement regarding confirmed features and a precise launch date are yet to be issued by Samsung.  However if the anticipated features are anything to go by, this will be ‘the’ smartphone to be seen with during 2012!

Regarded by many, as one of the greatest smartphones in the world, one would ask ‘just how’ can the Samsung Galaxy S2 be improved upon.  With its incredibly commanding dual core processor, striking display, its superb slender design and the S2’s remarkable 8 megapixel camera, it’s true that these features are certainly hard to outdo!

First of the rumoured changes to the Galaxy S2 specification is an increase in its overall screen size.  With a 4.3 inch Super AMOLED Plus touchscreen and a 800 × 480 screen resolution, the Samsung Galaxy S2 display certainly won over its critics.  It is anticipated however that the Samsung Galaxy S3 will boast up to an incredible 4.6 inch Super AMOLED Plus HD touchscreen with a potential 720 × 1280 screen resolution.  The S3 display will undoubtedly ensure rich, vibrant colours, smoother textures and a fantastic viewing experience.

With such a spectacular display, it would be rational to expect an equally exciting camera that will have the ability to produce exceptional high quality photos and video clips.  Well if reports are correct we will not be disappointed! Not satisfied with the original improvement, from the 5 megapixel camera on the Samsung Galaxy S model, to an impressive 8 megapixels with the Galaxy S2.  Rumour has it that the remarkable S3 version will feature up to a massive 16 megapixel camera; with an upgraded image sensor; dual LED flash and 1080P video capture (60 frames per second).  These types of features if correctly predicted, would allow the Samsung Galaxy S3 to shine, pardon the pun, in poorly lit, dull and indoor camera situations.

This state of the art device is projected to run on the Android Ice Cream Sandwich OS software.  To guarantee an unforgettable performance the new S3 will enjoy an Exynos 1.5GHz or 1.8GHz quad-core processor and could boast up to 32GB internal storage with 2GB RAM.

There is increased speculation that the Samsung Galaxy S3 will feature an extraordinary waterproof coating with a ceramic back plate or casing to aid in its shock resistant qualities.    This is also the ambitious rumour in circulation that the Galaxy S3 will introduce a new flexible display which will then render the device almost unbreakable.   This is probably the least conceivable feature on the S3 feature wish list but regardless, the Samsung Galaxy S3 is undeniably one of the most anticipated Android smartphones to be released on today’s market!

image from http://www.phonearena.com/

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iPad 3

The third generation iPad features an eye popping retina display that is unlike anything the world has ever seen. Razor sharp text and vibrant colors rest in a deep field of 3.1 million intensely packed pixels. It features a 5mp iSight camera and enables you to record 1080p HD video. Not to mention the well over half a million apps that you can download with a single touch. With similar dimensions to its predecessors, this new iPad will fit in most cases designed for the iPad 2. While the tablet revolution has been well underway for the past few years, iPad 3 may just fire the shot that wins the war.

PlayStation Vita

Gamers rejoice, as there is finally a handheld gaming device that offers both 3G as well as WiFi capabilities. This means, that with this little piece of magic, you can engage in multi-player games with others from around the globe while you are on the go. With a touchscreen on the surface and a touchpad bringing up the rear, controlling your characters has never been more fluid or more realistic. The player also features a 6-Axis motion center that offers an incredible amount of flexibility when manipulating characters on the screen. You can also track down nearby players with the built in GPS.

Fitbit Aria

- This WiFi smart scale is certain to revolutionize the way that we watch our weight. The scale not only measures your heaviness, but also weighs in on your BMI and body fat percentage. Those totals are then wirelessly uploaded to the Fitbit site for safe keeping. The stylish scale features a glass top, some sleek lighting and a snazzy built-in, circular display. It will recognize each user that steps up to be weighed and the intuitive Fitbit site will provide you with all of the graphs, charts and data you need to track your progress. All of the data can be viewed and manipulated from your home computer or mobile device.

Powerbag

- The gadget to help you hold all of your gadgets will not only keep them safe from the outside elements but will also charge them for you. While these bags have been around for a few years, the recently released line takes the concept to a whole new level. Choose from messenger bags, briefcases and backpacks for gear that will keep you charged while you travel. The latest products in this advanced line of logical luggage feature a convenient charge level indicator built in to the on and off switch that is disguised in the logo on the outside of the bag.

Kindle Fire

- If you are a bibliophile that has been holding out on purchasing an e-reader for ethical reasons, Kindle Fire may be just the thing that brings you into the world of virtual books. Exceptional screen quality is coupled with an affordable price to create and all-in-one tablet that allows you to do just about everything. The 7-inch device features a powerful Web browser and allows you to shop in the Android app store. You also have access to the millions of books, music and videos that Amazon offers in digital format.

iPhone 5

- While the iPhone 4S sent the smartphone world simmering, the iPhone 5 is set to have it bubbling over. Rumored to have a whopping 64 GB, this phone will likely feature double the storage space of its predecessors. The rumor mill also whispers of voice control and a slightly larger screen to watch all of that video it will be able to hold. The new phone will likely feature a retina display that is similar to the one sported by the latest generation iPad.

This article was written by Robin Marchant – National Marketing Manager of BrennanIT -providers of IT Services Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

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Image via CrunchBase

Are you thinking of hale and hearty Windows Recovery? This article will revolve around a particular case of Windows system inaccessibility and the need for professional data recovery software. Windows contains a variety of system files that are critical to the operating system. Some of these files include the drivers for various hardware devices installed on your computer. You may occasionally find these files to be corrupt or damaged. This generally happens as a result of some other software or malware, hardware conflicts, over-clocking, etc. In such circumstances, the system fails to boot and you face a catastrophic data loss. To overcome this problem, you need to go for Windows data recovery software through a reliable third-party utility.

For instance, you may receive any of the following error messages while trying to start your Windows-based system:

”STOP: 0xc000026C [Unable to load device driver]DriverName.”

Or
”STOP: 0xc0000221 [Unable to load device driver]DriverName.”

Or
”STOP: 0xc0000221. Bad image check sum, the image user32.dll is possibly corrupt. The header
check sum does not match the computed check sum.”

Grounds of the Problem:
Such kind of behavior occurs, if any one of the given conditions hold true:

• A corrupt or damaged device driver file.
• Corrupt or damaged User32.dll file.

Solution:

For resolving the above error, you have to replace the corrupt or damaged driver file and User32.dll file:

Place the bootable Windows XP CD into the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, and then restart your
computer. Select the required options to start your system through the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM
drive.

1. At the ‘Welcome to Setup’ screen, select R to open the Recovery         Console.
2. Choose the Windows XP installation if your system has a multi-boot configuration.
3. Enter the administrator password, if asked, and then press ENTER.
4. Now, run the below given commands:
   cd windowssystem32drivers
   cd windowssystem32
5. Type the following commands to rename the corrupt or damaged driver file, and then press ENTER.
   Ren drivername.sys drivername.bak
   ren user32.dll user32.bak
6. In case of device driver file, you have to run the below command for copying the driver from
   the Windows XP CD-ROM to the drivers folder:.
   Copy cd-rom:i386 drivername
   In case of User32.dll file, expand a new copy of the User32.dll file from the CD-ROM of
   Windows XP to the System32 folder, and run this command:expand cd-rom:i386user32.dl_ c:windowssystem37. At last, type exit, and press ENTER. Now, restart your computer.

However, if you are still facing the issue, you should reinstall the Windows operating system. To recover data after completion of the process, you can take help of a third party Windows data recovery software.

Such software are adept at easily recovering all your lost data from Windows-based drives and volumes. Additionally, they embrace a range of easy-to-use features to make the recovery process facile and less time-consuming.

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