You should look into solid-state storage!

Getting into beta tests is really hard. Oh, wait, release candidates have been out for ages, and anyone could get them...

Nothing personal, but its pretty obvious you don't have TECHNICAL knowledge about the subject matter when you're claiming its only "graphical enhancements" and a "big service pack".

One of the nice things about Win7 is that it no longer caches frequently-used apps on startup. That makes a HUGE difference on boot-up. Memory management has also been enhanced.

I'm prolly gonna do a motherboard replacement before I buy Win7. The idea of having just a shitload of RAM is too much to resist. :icon17:

Apple fans are in for some surprises on that front.

What program do you recommend to get files back that have been deleted, formatted, etc?

Before he answers that, I'll preface with this: getting files back is completely dependent on how long its been since you "deleted" the file. If its been a while, more than likely the file space where the file was existing was overwritten and wont be able to be recovered, barring some fancy schmancy expensive government equipment potentially. Same goes for formatting, but with formatting since you are destroying the original file system (UNLESS you did a "quick format"), you'd only be able to find chunks of your files if they are large. Smaller files would be pretty easy to find more than likely.

Think of your file system as a pointer to not only where files are, but where the rest of the file is. Most people don't realize that files aren't actually stored in one tidy spot on your hard drive - more often than not, they are scattered all over the thing in random open places called clusters (on windows machines). When you delete a file, its not actually deleted - the file system simply flags those clusters as being able to be overwritten with new data when it becomes available. This is why, during a criminal investigation, getting a hard drive intact without contaminating it is absolutely vital - overwriting the data the criminal tried to hide could be a case-breaker.

As far as SPECIFIC software, I dont know off hand other than some called EnCase, but an encase license tends to be very expensive. But if you have it, you can make it back easily, restoring data for people (hence why its very expensive...)

have you heard of a program called virtualLab data recovery?

Bobo is 100% correct, in terms of recovery it depends on many things:
~How was the file deleted? Format, Quick format, just deleted, etc.
~Time since lose of file?

The first thing you should look into for recovery is from the hard drive manufacture itself, Seagate, Western Digital, etc. have some free data recovery that are ok. Beyond that it all becomes a variable of price, how much you want to spend? I have not tested any in a while, office just does clean installs and everything triple backed up, home I have double back up setup so I never have a need for it.

I know I could link the video but not sure many of you want to watch it. Go to engdaget and search for the engadget show. There last show had a 30 minute interview with Steve Ballmer, he explained his view (and Microsofts view) on what they feel from XP/Vista/7. For those who do not want to watch it, Vista was meant to break things as it was, the same thing happened when they did Windows 2000 (not sure how many remember that), and XP was the holy grail that took 2000 to the next level. Vista was suppose to break things, but they hoped with giving companies (driver writers, software companies, etc.) the OS two years in advance it would ease the pain. Apparently these companies thought no one would want to switch to Vista and they were shocked with all those who wanted to.

No wonder Vista's release was buggy as hell lol.

XP WAS a pretty solid upgrade, though. It was light years better than 98...

the biggest problems with Vista had little to do with the actual product itself. It mainly was a problem with marketing especially with the whole Vista ready campaign and computers that weren't ever going to be Vista ready. Secondly Nvidia takes a huge chunk of the blame for faulty drivers. Anyone with an Nvidia card and vista has to remember at least once seeing BSODs. The marketing campaign wasn't that impressive either and was quickly overshadowed by the much better apple ads. MS tried to come back with the I'm a PC ads but it was too little too late. I frequent Anandtech and the consensus for the most part is Vista is a good little OS especially for the fact the it's 64bit support is far superior to XP's buggy 64bit support.

What MS got right with 7. (note I will agree that it isn't some mind blowing new OS here to be your OS messiah) . However it is more responsive and leaner. It installs quickly and without any hassle. All my hardware works out of the box and if it doesn't for the most part a driver is found downloaded and installed automatically. (note I did have trouble finding drivers for a scanner from a defunct company). 7's greatest strength came in making the Beta and then the RC public allowing word of mouth to be the marketing campaign. Because in the end its people like me that adopt the Beta the RC early and use it like it then recommend it to his friends and family.

That's because XP used the NT kernel and 98 was a DOS shell.

Since we're on a backup jag here, how many who have claimed to have sufficient backup also have an offsite backup?

If you houze burnz down, you has no backupz.

TAPE DRIVE BABY.

Nah, I wont claim to have some crazy backup system at all. Honestly I dont have anything absolutely critical on my computer. Just some niceties really.

Tape Drive = ftl

I use Shadow Protect on my computers. Image the entire drive after software, current SP, etc is installed...and is working properly lol. Then that image goes to my folk's house. Files get backed up incrementally on an external RAID.

At home I have no vital information that if lost I would care about.
Mainly because much of my data is pictures, movies, etc. So any hard copy of that information will also go up in the flames unless I am able to acquire it before it all goes down.
We still use tape drives at my office for off site back up use, load the tape once a week and then it gets stored away. For local back ups we have gone to blu-ray as we were going through 6 DVDs minimum and we need something local that is not hard drive based.