Month: September 2007

Probably the worst fate that can ever befall a PC owner is when your hard drive stops responding or simply dies. Hard drives don’t last forever which is why it’s important to make regular backups. However, if you haven’t then don’t panic as it may be possible to salvage some of your data. Dead Disk Doctor allows you to copy data from scratched, damaged or unreadable hard drives and even CDs, DVDs and Floppy disks.

It works by replacing lost data with random bytes and reading files by expandable blocks. The program is very simple to use – simply instruct it which device to inspect, select the files to copy and then select the destination folder. Dead Disk Doctor will then attempt to ‘clean’ the files and copy them. Afterwards, you can then burn them onto CD or DVD with the program of your choice. These three simple steps may be the difference between losing an essential file forever or rescuing the majority of it.

Now that our dear friend Victoria Beckham has been living in the States for a couple of months, I’m sure she’s had enough time to settle down and organize her stressful life. However, I thought we may as well give her some tips on software tools that can help little Vicky in many ways. You know, even big stars like her use a computer, as long as it has some Swarovski stones stuck on it, of course.

Now, the first thing Posh Spice will probably do when she wakes up at noon in the morning is some exercise. She can easily keep track of her progress with Fitness Assistant while also controlling her diet with EGDiet. Note: I don’t know if she’s on a diet for sure, but she must be: you can’t have that almost bidimensional body if you eat normally.

Time to go shopping! Dear Victoria, forget about cash desk queues and mall crowds: you can have fun at home with games like Shopping Marathon or even build your own empire with Posh Shop (no relation). In case you don’t find anything in the stores of Rodeo Drive, you can always design your own clothing line with Virtual Fashion. And when your clothes collection starts to overwhelm you, don’t freak out: use Dress Assistant and you’ll keep everything under control.

After such a stressful time I’m sure Posh must be tired, so what about paying a visit to the hairdresser? Relax while you receive a sweet head massage and get a new hair look! Don’t be worried about the final result, because you can check it out with Hair Pro before actually trimming or dyeing anything.

New clothes, new look, is there anything left for Victoria to do? Well, maybe she’d like to refurbish their multi-million-dollar mansion with Sweet Home 3D, or even follow David’s team progress in Major League Soccer with Ltrack. But my personal advice here, after what I’ve seen, is to practice a bit with this online driving school game.

Have you ever wanted to increase the quality of your MP3 files? Or maybe you’ve wanted to decrease the quality so that you can fit more files onto your hard drive or external listening device. The quality of MP3s depends on the bitrate that they were recorded at i.e. the frequency that they are in KiloBits per Second (Kbps). The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality although the more space it takes on your hard drive. Usually your MP3s are stuck in the bitrate that they were recorded or downloaded in but 4Musics MP3 Bitrate Changer modifies the frequency of MP3s by simply allowing you to right-click and change it to the frequency of your choice.

In addition to this, it features a label publishing option that allows you to enter the data of the song, artist, group, genre etc. In order to make conversions simultaneously, you can leave a whole batch of MP3s for automatic conversion whilst you do other things or just leave your PC running. If you regularly need to to alter the frequency of your music, then this is an incredibly quick and efficient way of doing it. However, once you go beyond 192Kbs, there really is little difference in sound quality considering the amount of hard disk space that they occupy.