Dennis Faas

Infopackets Reader Jeff S. writes: " Dear Dennis, This is not so much a question, but a comment. Several weeks ago I picked up a 120GB Maxtor Hard Drive at Best Buy. I decided to use this drive for backing up my digital pics, MP3's, downloads, etc. ... I also wanted to use the new drive to backup my operating system, but totally sure which one was right for me. I borrowed a copy of Norton Ghost from a friend, installed it on my system, but wasn't too impressed with the interface (I found it difficult to understand); I also thought the price was a little too high (at $69.99 retail). It was at ... (view more)

Synopsis: Discover the most realistic game of Cribbage available! Sit down and have fun with the adventurous Wes, the perky Starla, the dastardly Chuckles, and others as they challenge you on five skill levels. Whether you are an expert or beginner, ... their knowledge of the game and never-ending charms will keep you entertained for years to come! With Championship Cribbage, you can learn basic play and strategy or improve your skills using unlimited hint, undo and replay. Popular variations including Lowball, Speedo, and many others are just a click away. Tweak scoring, deck size, number of ... (view more)

Data recovery is the process of recovering data from primary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. This can be due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the ... host operating system. Data Recovery: Physical damage A wide variety of failures can cause physical damage to storage media. CD-ROMs can have their metallic substrate or dye layer scratched off; hard disks can suffer any of several mechanical failures, such as head crashes and failed motors; and tapes can simply break. Physical damage always causes ... (view more)

Synopsis: Wouldn't it be cool if you could type in a word and have your computer perform a series of functions? With SureType, it's a reality! No matter what you are doing on your computer -- and regardless of which application you're using -- you ... could just type in word\ (for example), and immediately have Microsoft Word load. Similarly, you could type excel\ and Microsoft Excel will open -- or, you could type in address\ and have your full email address typed onto the screen! With SureType, the possibilities are endless. And don't forget: only when you type the special expansion key after a ... (view more)

I've just received wind that Acronis has released Disk Director Suite version 10 -- the perfect companion to the extremely popular Acronis True Image (disk imaging backup software)! Who is Acronis, you ask? Acronis is a leading software company that ... specializes in storage management solutions for mission-critical situations. Acronis provides technically advanced (but simple to use) applications for: disaster recovery, backup and restoration, hard drive partitioning, boot management, data migration and other storage management products. Acronis' line of disk management software has won many ... (view more)

Blogosphere (alternate: BlogSphere or BloggingSphere) is the collective term encompassing all weblogs or blogs as a community or social network. Many weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read others' blogs, link to them, reference them in ... their own writing, and post comments on each others' blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture. The term blogosphere was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke. It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick (quite seriously) and was quickly adopted and promulgated by the warblog community. Many ... (view more)

Synopsis: What's the ultimate research engine? Answer: MetaProducts Inquiry! If you need a fast and easy way to save and analyze web pages for later offline browsing, then MetaProducts Inquiry is just what the doctor ordered! With MetaProducts ... Inquiry you can collect, organize and view information from the web quickly, easily -- and with little effort. MetaProducts Inquiry comes fully integrated with Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) as a service toolbar, plus it offers right-click context menus for IE, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera Browsers. Coupled with an unparalelled ability to grab almost ... (view more)

Today's issue of the Gazette is a series of very important announcements. Let me begin by telling you what's been happening in my life. I don't normally write about personal stuff, but this circumstance is different because it directly affects ... infopackets.com. At any rate, here goes: As of November 2nd, 2005, I finalized the deal on my new home. Prior to the 2nd (and beginning October 20th), I was running around like mad trying to get everything settled -- such as: meeting with the builder regularly, the bank, the lawyers, and making tons of phone calls to service providers. All of this ... (view more)

A checksum is a form of redundancy check, a very simple measure for protecting the integrity of data by detecting errors in data that is sent through space (telecommunications) or time (storage). It works by adding up the basic components of a ... message, typically the bytes, and storing the resulting value. Later, anyone can perform the same operation on the data, compare the result to the authentic checksum, and (assuming that the sums match) conclude that the message was probably not corrupted. The simplest form of checksum, which simply adds up the bytes in the data, cannot detect a number ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Michel S. writes: " Dear Dennis, First, thank you for this very informative and welcoming website. My question today is in regard to a corrupt DVD disc. After having burned some of my favorite downloaded files to DVD disc (using ... the 'D-well' brand blank DVD), some files appear to be OK, but part of the DVD disc cannot be accessed at all. ;-( I am using an ASUS DVD writer and Nero 6.0 for my backup. So far, my computer friends haven't been able to help me with this issue. I'd certainly appreciate if you can help me to clarify this mystery. Thank you in advance! " ... (view more)