INTEL Vs AMD – The short review

I SUPPOSE YOU COULD SAY we've conducted plenty of CPU reviews in our time, but we just can't bring ourselves to slow things down. The release of Windows Vista and a round of price cuts by AMD prompted us to hatch a devious plan involving Vista, a new test suite full of multithreaded and 64-bit applications, fifteen different CPU configurations, and countless hours of lab testing.

Choosing a processor is an exercise in predicting the future. Given the rapid pace of technology, you'd ideally like a CPU—and the other parts of the system—to last a few years. Choose a CPU that's too new and you end up on the pricey, bleeding edge of the envelope. Choose one that's been around too long and you may find yourself struggling to run new software. Whether you're buying a PC, making an upgrade, or building a new system from scratch, you'll face the same problems.

Intel has been firing on all cylinders while AMD has been playing catch-up. The coming year looks to be more of the same. Both companies are poised to introduce new product lines. Intel is moving forward with a substantially new micro architecture, whereas AMD is just now making the move to the 45nm manufacturing process, which Intel has been using for nearly a year. The smaller architecture allows CPU manufacturers to build processors that use lower power and run at higher clock speeds, as well as cram more transistors on a CPU die.

Still, moving to 45nm should make AMD somewhat more competitive, at least in the midrange and low-end desktop market. AMD's Phenom processor line had some advantage in certain types of servers, particularly those applications that benefit from low latency memory access. Yet Intel's latest CPU, the Core i7 series, may eliminate or reduce those advantages.

Shift+Delete

Do you need to recover lost files, photos or documents? You're sure that a file was on your hard disk some time ago, but now it seems to have disappeared. Perhaps you archived some files or photos to CD or DVD to save disk space, and now the disk is corrupt or unreadable? Or perhaps your computer won't boot up, and you don't have a backup!

It may seem as if all is lost. But don't panic! Your data is almost certainly still on your hard drive somewhere. This article will help you choose the best method for restoring them.

Accidental deletion is the most common cause of lost data. Modern operating systems provide protection against accidentally deleting files. In Windows, it's called the Recycle Bin. It's basically a special folder to which files are moved when they are deleted. As far as the operating system is concerned files that are deleted to the Recycle Bin are not really deleted at all. If you think you have deleted a file, the Recycle Bin should be the first place that you look.

If you empty the Recycle Bin, or Shift+Delete a file, then the file becomes deleted as far as the operating system is concerned. The file disappears from any folder listing and the disk space occupied by the data becomes available for re-use. But the data is not physically erased from the disk. The disk space still contains the data. And it is not re-used immediately. What data recovery products do is find ways to locate this data so that the files can be undeleted or unerased
When files are deleted, a lot of pointers to the data are still left lying around. Because of this, recovering deleted files can be treated as a special case as far as data recovery goes.
It's a lot quicker than a full data recovery, which requires locating the contents of lost files with no additional pointers at all. Some data recovery tools will only recover deleted files.

Recovering photos

Specialist data recovery software can speed up the process and improve the chances of success by searching just for specific file types. . Using forensic techniques they can locate lost files on otherwise unrecoverable disks.

Photo recovery software will know, for example, that a JPG image file will start with the characters "JFIF". Following that is a header that gives more information about the file, such as its length. The software will scan the disk looking for a cluster that starts with "JFIF", determine the expected file length, and then read as many clusters as necessary to create a file of that length.

However, the recovered images will be corrupt if the file was fragmented. Because the data stream in a photo image file is essentially random, it isn't as easy to piece together a file from fragments in the way that you can for a text-based document.