Featured

Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Answers Questions

A new search engines that is currently in Beta stage, Wolfram Alpha is a bit of a mix between the Google OneBox and Wikipedia. It’s closed right now, as they are still testing it, but when it’s going to be open it will allow you to use normal search queries, as far as I can tell from the video demo that they’ve released.

I didn’t get a chance to test this start-up yet, but they are launching soon enough, so a more detailed review is going to show up eventually. You can find out a lot about Wolfram Alpha by watching the video, as it gives you a lot of tips on what this new search engine can do. If you love data, the possibilities that this start-up is offering are stunning to say the least. The video is a bit blurry, but you can still get what it’s saying very well. Still, they should’ve done a better job on the video, considering that it’s the demo that they’re showing to the world.

Wolfram Alpha shouldn’t be considered as something that will kill Google, but they aren’t really on the same level. There isn’t anything being done by Google right now that is on the same level as Wolfram Alpha. The public data search from Google might come close a bit, but not that close. Ultimately, the public test will make it or break it. If it’s good enough to be used on a daily basis then maybe it has a future.

Anyway, as far as a normal search is concerned, Google is the best and it will be for a long time. Taking a look at it, Wolfram Alfa actually seems to be more of a Wikipedia competitor than a Google one. I’m actually looking forward for the open test, to see what it can really do.

Best Free Data Recovery Tool

Losing data from your hard drive can be a very annoying experience, as you may know. But, unless your hard drive was destroyed completely, there is a good chance that you can recover your data by using special tools, designed for such an occasion.
Here we will talk about some of the free tools that can be used for data recovery. It doesn’t matter if you deleted all the data by accident from your computer or from the SD card. Using the right tools allows you to recover any sort of data lost or deleted from your hard drive.

One option for you would be to use Ubuntu Live CD, which doesn’t recover your files from the hard drive, but it does allow you to boot up your computer with it. If you Windows installation is messed up, an Ubuntu Live CD might be just what you need to fix it.

O&O Format Recovery is a software that I’ve used in the past on a number of occasions and it did the trick every single time, recovering all the files that I’ve lost.

Recuva is a great app to use. I actually tested it against another tool, SpinRite, and it did a much better job at recovering files. It’s also free, while SpinRite isn’t.
GetDataBack is my favorite tool actually, beating even Recuva. During one especially nasty week I lost four hard drives and the only tool that got me through that period and helped me recover the files was GetDataBack. It was the absolute best tool that I’ve tried during that period, and I tried a lot of them.
If the hard drive has physical problems, the best tool to use is GetDataBack. A freeware application will not help you as much. If you haven’t experience such problems until now, consider yourself lucky.

Vista Shutdown Timer

Vista Shutdown Timer is a small program that doesn’t occupy a lot of space and it allows you to shut down your computer at an hour specified in advance. Another bonus that I enjoyed in this software was that it faded down the volume of the computer, allowing you to remain asleep as this happens. This small piece of software is made only for Windows.

This software doesn’t need to be installed, so it’s more than easy to do. First, pick a time period that you want to pass before the computer will automatically shutdown. You also have the option to order it to go in standby mode at the specified time. After you select all the options, use Run Timer to finish the configuration. What I loved about the sound fade was that I usually run music on my PC, so instead of cutting it all of a sudden, the music fades when the computer shuts down. This way I don’t wake up when the computer closes. It takes quite a bit of time for me to get asleep, and music helps me, so this little utility comes in handy.

This piece of software is absolutely free to download. Vista Shutdown Timer will work well on XP, even though the name suggests that it’s made only for Vista. If you have used the software on another OS, or you have another experience with those we tested, let us know in the comments. WinOff is a software that does about the same thing as Vista Shutdown Timer. ShutdownGuard is another piece of software, that doesn’t allow automatic updates to shut down your PC. Both are very useful utilities if you’re looking for something like that.

All the utilities mentioned here should help you if you need to shut down your PC automatically.