There’s nothing I hate more than getting a virus on my computer or encountering a website while surfing that causes my system to crash. These things always seem to happen when you are in the middle of writing an email, or working on a document don’t they?

How often have you lost files that you’ve been working on and haven’t saved, or that were saved in the past, but were open for editing?

It would be great if you could easily recover files that were damaged by virus attack, accidental formating, or maybe ones that were in the recycle bin that you deleted by mistake?

Well … there is a program that can recover damaged or deleted files and folders. It’s called Active File Recovery, and it’s easy to use. You can also use the program to recover photographs and other media files, even those deleted from flash memory, or data that has been lost due to formating a memory card.

Not only is this program really easy to use, but it also acts as an efficient data recovery tool. The Active File Recovery Software Enterprise Installation package comes with a CD/DVD ISO image that you can burn in order to get a bootable DVD or CD with a lightweight version of windows Vista that will run in RAM.

So if your system crashes and you can’t get it to boot up you can just slip the DVD or CD into your system and you’ll be able to get it to boot. This will allow you to get into your computer and perhaps use system restore to return your system to a time when it was working properly, say before you installed a program that corrupted files on your computer.

Being able to boot your crashed system will also allow you to use the Active File Recovery program to check for damaged or deleted files as well. Perhaps simply recovering a file that you deleted or that was damaged before you system crashed will be all that’s needed to get your computer working properly again.

Another thing that I like about Active File Recovery is that you can also perform a Partition Recovery. So, if you have format damage to a partition, or you’ve had disk partition loss you can repair it with the professional version of Active File Recovery.

If you’d like to use this software for your business you can get a Corporate license. There are three versions of this program - Standard, professional and Enterprise with prices ranging from $29.95 to $99. Each product comes with free updates and technical support.

If you’d like to try before you buy you can download a demo copy of this program on the main page of the site. Check it out, it sounds like a great software program.

Now this is something that I can use, and I hope that you can too. Have you see some of the USB flash thumb drives in stores recently? I actually thought about getting one this past summer to help with transfer data from computer to computer or for when I go out of town. I could easily put my guitar tabs and music documents onto a flash drive and take them with me in case I wanted to use them on someone else’s computer.

I can think of so many practical uses for a portable thumb drive it’s unbelievable actually - music storage, your kid carry homework back to school on a USB drive, copying files from the work computer so you can work from home and on and on. The possibilities are endless. Well I think they are. What would you do with a thumb drive?

Pexagon tech is selling USB flash thumb drives right now for a very good price. 1 gb drives are going for $20.00 and 2 gm drives are $38.99; not only that- they are offering free lasor engraving of your name or business name on the case. Wouldn’t that be handy if you layed your thumb drive down and forgot it? Whoever found it would know who to return it to, heck you could even have your phone number engraved on the case.

You can select a range sizes of thumb drives from 512 mb to 4 gb and you’ll have 5 different color choices for the case. I’m quite impressed with the design of the product, the small size and of course the pricing.

We’ve all heard of police finding finger prints at the scene of a crime but how often do they get the orginal print too? Police in Germany got just that, when a careless burglar left behind a vital clue at a break-in when he sliced off the end of a finger on a broken window while committing a robbery.

The police were able to match the piece of finger with existing prints they had from a 15-year-old of Iraqi origin. The youth initially denied breaking and entering into an office to steal a computer but confessed when police produced the digital remnant.

I wonder if the police kept the “tip” on ice while they sought the criminal or not?

Now here’s a cool idea! How many times have you been somewhere and remembered something you needed to get, or something you had to do later that day or some time during the week? When that happens you rarely write it down. You just tell yourself- ok I’ve got to remember that. You do that too don’t you?

Well now when that happens to you, you can simply dial a toll free number on your cell phone or on any regular telephone and call a toll free number and leave yourself a message. COOL huh?

This is a new service that was recently started by a company called BrainCast. Whenever you leave yourself a message you’ll get an email to remind you about the message. You can organize your messages into categories too and if you do - then when when you look them up on the Braincast site they’ll be organized. You can leave a message from just about anywhere, and because your messages are in one location online you can also retrieve your messages from any computer, cell phone or telephone. Easy and it’s free too!

This service works on all US based cell and telephone networks.