Micks' Musings

I have had a SmartQ V7 (7 inch Android tablet) for a while now and it has served me well. I have read a few books, browsed the web and played a few simplae games on it. However the one thing I found lacking was the screen was too small to read comics comfortably. So I have bought an ePad V2 10.2in Android tablet - with 512M of memory it had double the memory of the SmartQ V7 which is an improvement. Its screen is 1024x600 compared to 800x480. I have tested comic reading and it does fine. The extra size makes a world of difference. It doesn't fit in a (big) pocket like the SmartQ does but it is thinner and only slightly heavier so goes in my backpack comfortably. At the same time as getting the ePad I bought my wife an iPad. Similar size screen - wider but shorter (1024x768, 4x3 aspect ratio as compared to the 16x9 of the ePad) - but a much better screen with much better responsiveness. The iPad responds to screen touches much better than the ePad and is an overall much better table...

This is a cautionary tale with, hopefully, a happy ending. The other day a friends laptop failed to boot after installing some updates. Not an unusual tale but, due to failing to spot the clues, we ran the restore of the boot drive using the system restore partition. Unfortunately this wiped out the data that was there. The clue I should have spotted? The fact that it was trying to boot from the D: drive. Somehow the 100MB boot partition had been marked as active and had moved the C: drive to D: causing the boot failure. Now that the data we thought was safe on the D: drive was gone how could we get it back? The non-existent backup did not help so I turned to NTFS recovery software. The first application turned out to be a dud - it ran for 36 hours before I gave up on it. In the end I used a program called ZAR 9. It was able to scan the disk and present a list of restorable files in under an hour. Not all the files are good - reformatting and dumping a system image will cause some dama...