LeBokov21.com

Every year around Christmas time, the amount of spam email traffic would increase by huge amount. A lot of people may experience delay in receiving emails due to mail servers being overloaded with spam. Last year, the web hosting company that I used to work at, had spam emails increased by over 500% than normal volume. The firewall servers were busy scanning all the incoming emails, causing delays up to 12 to 24 hours. This was very annoying especially for the business clients who rely on email extensively.

Testing Email Service

So this is the time for the real test to the web hosting companies. If you are still receiving emails in a timely manner at this time around, then your web hosting service provider should be doing pretty well in managing its email service. This blog is being hosted by Bluehost. I am going to test its email service by sending some emails to a lebokov21.com email address from my personal Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail accounts.

Bluehost Passed

I have sent three emails from each of my Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail account. All emails from Gmail and Hotmail were received instantly at my lebokov21.com account. Two of the three emails from Yahoo were received instantly. The other email from Yahoo didn’t arrive at all. (When I was working in the web hosting company, It has often happened with emails from Yahoo being lost if emails were sent within short amount of time to the same address. There seems to be some rules on Yahoo’s side governing this.)

From the tests, it seems that Bluehost’s email service is doing pretty well even during the spamming season. I wonder if other Bluehost users are experiencing the same. How is your email service doing from your hosting service provider?

If you have heard of or even used VMware, then you should already know what virtualization is. Here is an explanation of virtualization from VMware.

In essence, virtualization lets you transform hardware into software. Use software such as VMware ESX Server to transform or “virtualize” the hardware resources of an x86-based computer-including the CPU, RAM, hard disk and network controller-to create a fully functional virtual machine that can run its own operating system and applications just like a “real” computer.

Generally speaking, it is to run an operating system on another operating system using the same hardware. For example, you can run a Linux operating system on top of your Windows XP inside your laptop computer. This allows you to use multiple operating systems at the same time using the same computer. All of them will be sharing the same resources.

VMware is one of the most popular virtualization software in the market. You can download VMware Server for free and register for a free serial number from its official website. There is another virtualization software called VirtualBox from Innotek. It is an open source software and it functions very much the same as VMware. (I am using VirtualBox on my Linux laptop.)

Virtualization helps me to provide quick support for different operating systems. When a customer calls me about Windows XP, I can quickly fires up my Windows XP virtual machine and provide assistance that is specific to Windows XP. When the next customer calls about Windows Vista, I can quickly switch to my Windows Vista virtual machine and provide the support specific to Windows Vista. It is one of the most useful tools that helps me do better in my computer business.

These “touch screen” and user interface technologies are pretty cool. You should better check them out. The first one is Jeff Han showing off his newly developed multi-touch screen in 2006. The second video is about Microsoft Surface.

These technologies are very interesting. However, I wonder how affordable the hardware are in order to use these technologies. Who can afford to buy a table with a multi-touch screen? Who can afford to get a PDA or cell phone with the capability to transfer data with your table? The prices for the Microsoft Surface are expected to be between $5000 US and $10000 initially. If prices do not drop, I don’t think they will be widely used.

A customer brought me a computer for fix. He said that his hard drive was partitioned into C: and D: and all of a sudden, the files in D: drive were gone. Only one folder had remained. My client thought he just lost 160GB of data. This seemed to be caused by some kind of viruses deleting files on your hard drive.

FreeUndelete, TOKIWA DataRecovery, Pandora Recovery and Restoration

In this case, I tried a number of free data recovery software in the attempt to recover as much data as possible for my client. The software I tried were FreeUndelete, TOKIWA DataRecovery, Pandora Recovery and Restoration. I have actually used Restoration for a few times before. However, I didn’t like its interface and the lack of restoring the file and folder structures. This is why I searched for other data recovery software this time.

Pandora Recovery Came Through

Among the software I have mentioned, all of them were able to find the files on my client’s hard drive. Most of the files were still there. However, FreeUndelete, TOKIWA DataRecovery and Restoration had crashed a number of times when I was trying to recover the files by copying them to another hard drive. Most of the time the crashes happened when there is a non-English filename or the file size is too large. Only Pandora Recovery was working properly and recovered the files. Also, only Pandora Recovery was able to keep the folder structure so it gave less headache to my client.

However, there is one disadvantage on Pandora Recovery which is the lack of FAT32 support. It can only read NTFS formatted drives. For FAT32, I had to use Restoration instead. So I would strongly recommend you to convert your drive to NTFS if your OS supports it.

After recovering most of the files, I ran a virus scan on the C: drive using NOD32. It found over a hundred files infected. To play safe, I suggested my customer to format and reinstall Windows just to make sure the system is clean.

Stop, Off and Call

If your files are suddenly gone and you are sure you have done nothing to them, then you should immediately turn of your computer to prevent the problem to expand. You should then immediately find a data recovery expert to help you recover your data. Do not write any files onto the drive as doing so will decrease the chance of recovering your data.

1. STOP - stop doing anything on your computer
2. OFF - turn your computer off
3. CALL - call a data recovery expert for help

Do you have any success on using other data recovery software? Please share them with us!

So are you having a hard time finding out which model of the peripheral being shown in the picture? Well, here is the answer - it is Logitech V500 notebook mouse! The red rectangle is the section I have shown in the trivia.

I have been using this mouse for my daily work for a couple years. This was my dream mouse when it first came out because of its stylish design. Its “scroll” is basically a flat panel design similar to a touch pad. You can scroll up, down, left and right with it. It’s on/off state is determined by expanding and contracting its base. The receiver can be stored inside the base of the mouse so you don’t need to carry them separately. This model also came with a bag to protect it from scratch when you carry it around. The only problem I have with this mouse is that because it was an older product, its optical is not sensitive enough on some smoother surfaces.

Since nobody answered the trivia correctly, I am saving the Thermaltake iXoft notebook cooling pad for the next contest.