Wrong! Hard drive failure is a very common problem with today’s computers. Unlike today’s popular flash-based media that uses memory chips, hard drives still rely on their mechanical components. These can fail at any time – and if you didn’t back up your data or set up a RAID array, you are in trouble.

We encountered the same problems with one of our lab’s hard drives, one full of important files and data. We first tried to restore the data using different software recovery tools. These usually work if you have lost the master boot sector or if you have corrupted sectors on the drive. None of these software packages, including Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional software package, were able to restore any of the files. The drive was suffering from media corruption and minor internal mechanical problems.

We sent the drive to Ontrack for repair using their Data Recovery services. They have four labs located in the New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Washington D.C. metropolitan areas. After a few days we were sent a file listing the whole file structure of the corrupted hard drive. Using the Ontrack’s free VeriFile application, which runs on their website as an ActiveX application, we were able to view which files were recoverable and which were lost. VeriFile is a great and unique application that can be very useful when trying to recover your data. It’s a web-based software application that gives you a preview of what was restorable on your hard drive. It allows you to search the hard drive file structure for specific files or filter by several options including read-only, compressed and encrypted. In our case only a couple of files were lost.

Within a few more days we received an external hard drive containing all the recovered data. As an alternative we could have received the data on a set of several DVDs, but we opted for the more convenient external drive. All the files recovered were accessible. The total cost of this service was $1,500.

Ontrack Data Recovery did an impressive job at recovering our data. This can be valuable when you don’t have backup copies of your important files. We definitely recommend Data Recovery if you have vital information on your corrupted hard drive.

As a preventative measure we always recommend to do backups of your valuable files on a regular basis. If your computer is capable of a RAID array, it’s a great alternative to have two hard drives set up as RAID in mirroring mode.

Earlier this year we were impressed with the Casper mattress, but you are about to learn more about our experience testing the Nest Bedding Alexander Signature Select mattress.

We unpacked the Nest Alexander, which inflated to its full size almost instantly. Nest Bedding makes the mattress in the US and uses non-toxic materials in the production process. We did not smell any of the unpleasant chemical odors that common foam mattresses tend to emit for weeks. Fully inflated and with no bad odors, within a few minutes the Alexander was ready to sleep on.

Unlike the 10” height of the Casper, the Alexander mattress is almost 14” high. In addition to the 2″ of gel foam, 2″ of visco foam and an 8″ density convoluted support layer, the Alexander has a 1.5″ top layer of soft foam in a quilted cover. The top layer adds a great feel to the mattress whether you sit down or lay on it.

Unlike the Casper, the Alexander can be ordered in three levels of firmness, which Nest Bedding refers to as “feel”. You can choose between soft, medium and firm. Most people will likely select the medium feel, but it is great to have the option to choose the level of firmness of your mattress. We tested the Alexander with the medium feel and we were pleased with the sleeping comfort in all positions.

The Alexander offers a better edge support than the Casper, in fact it’s easier to sit on the edge of the bed.

The only issue we have with the Alexander is the price. Their Twin size mattress at $999 is almost double the price of the Casper Twin at $500. The Full, Queen and King mattresses are a better value; for example the Alexander King is $1,399, still almost 50% more than the Casper King at $950.

We found the Alexander to be a comfortable mattress to sleep on. We did not run into any of the issues that other mattresses in the space suffer from. With the Alexander we did not sink into the mattress, we did not suffer from overheating while sleeping and we did not experience any nasty chemical odors. In our sleeping comfort tests, the Nest Alexander ranked better than the Casper mattress.

Overall the Nest Alexander is a great mattress that delivers a good night sleep. The only drawback is pricing. While for a Twin size mattress we definitely recommend the Casper, for all other sizes the Alexander might be worth the extra money.

A quick survey of our readers shows that for people on a budget, they usually purchase a king size foam mattress online for around $600, while our more affluent readers tend to spend over $3,000 for Tempur-Pedic style mattress. How about a mattress that’s nearly as comfortable as a Tempur-Pedic, yet it costs not much more than a standard foam mattress? We recently found out that such option exists, the Casper mattress.

Internet startup Casper fills that perfect mattress sweet spot. A comfortable mattress delivered to your home in a box, for less than $1,000 (for a king size.)

We had a few of our editors experience sleeping for several weeks on a popular foam mattress sold on Amazon, a Casper mattress as well as a premium mattress.

The Casper mattress arrives in a box within a few days of your order. Unlike foam mattresses that require 2-3 days to air out the chemical smells and inflate to full height, the Casper mattress was ready in less than 20 minutes and it didn’t have any of the unpleasant chemical smells.

One of the main differences of a Casper mattress is that its top layer is 1.5” of latex foam, then a 1.5” layer of memory foam, with a 7” layer of base foam. Most regular memory foam mattresses don’t have a layer of latex, and if they do, it’s usually beneath a layer of memory foam. That’s one of Casper’s main differences.

Sleeping on a Casper mattress is very comfortable, its layers of foam and latex allow for a comfortable sleep without overheating. For some of our editors sleeping on a regular foam mattress was unbearable, causing them to wake up in the morning in a pool of sweat.

The Casper mattress is not too soft nor too hard, it’s somewhere in between. Unlike the foam mattress, it’s easy to flip around on and it’s comfortable for night activities. We must admit though, that we liked better to sleep on our premium mattress, but the Casper’s comfort was not far off.

One of the main drawbacks for the Casper is the lack of edge support. If you like to sit on the edge of your bed while getting dressed, you won’t like to do it on your Casper mattress. Its slick cover design gives the impression of a sturdy edge, but the mattress lacks any real edge support.

Even the cheaper foam mattress we tested offered a better edge support.

Overall we feel that the Casper mattress is a great choice for the price. You get a slick and comfortable mattress made in the USA delivered to your home for less than a $1,000, you don’t have to worry about

sweating at night and it’s almost as comfortable as a premium mattress that runs three times the price.

The device is a well-designed sensor that you can set on your night stand. To best use the features of the ResMed S+, the user must point it at their chest and keep the device at an arm’s length, to ensure it can properly detect your vitals. Once downloaded, the app that works on iOS and Android, the user needs to create an account and sync the S+ with a smartphone via Bluetooth. In testing, the setup was more difficult than anticipated.

Every night, before bed, the user must make sure their phone is properly synced with the S+ and they also must complete a questionnaire that inquires about their level of stress, alcohol and caffeine consumptions, and how much they exercised that day.

We had a few members of our staff take the S+ at home and test it. We found that with people who generally get a good night sleep, they got tired of using the S+ and were uninterested in the results.

The S+ seemed more useful for people who don’t always get a good night’s sleep. The S+ calculates how many hours of actual sleep you had each evening and it breaks it down into light, deep and Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. It then compares this number to an average cycle of expected sleep and informs the user if they should get more REM sleep. This is helpful because your brain is more refreshed the next day or more deep sleep so your body has more energy with an increased amount of REM sleep.

The S+ app provides the user an overview of how they slept the night before as well as the history of their previous nights. The user can also log into the website to view a more detailed history of their sleep. Just recently, a new feature has been added to the website where users can select up to 28 nights of sleep and have a summary prepared to take to your doctor. While the concept of sharing your sleep results with your doctor is appealing, we didn’t like the lack of detailed information. A sleep doctor might want to see more details to properly evaluate your sleep patterns. In general, we feel that with the amount of data collected, ResMed can do a better job at presenting a more thorough analysis on the website.

While the S+ does a fairly good job in collecting sleeping patterns, we came across a few glitches during testing. For example, if you wake up and stop your sleep session through your phone, and later decide to go back to sleep, the website doesn’t comprehend that you had two sleep sessions in one night. We also found that re-syncing the phone with the S+ every night is not always so simple, as it often times requires restarting the Bluetooth connection and rediscovering the device. Testers had this issue with both iPhones and Android phones.

Our biggest complaint is that we would expect from ResMed to detect if the person is snoring or having sleep apnea episodes, and the S+ does not have that function ability. We had one of our editors who suffers from loud snoring and severe sleep apnea, to use the S+. The S+ did not detect the snoring, not even as loud noise, nor did it detect episode of sleep apnea.

The S+ has a retail value of $150, but ResMed doesn’t charge a monthly fee for the sleep monitoring or the website access, which is a big plus. In general we like the concept of the S+, but we expected a bit more from ResMed. A fully featured website and the ability to properly detect sleep problems would turn the S+ into a great product.

The Dropcam Pro is an improvement compared to the original Dropcam. It comes with a wider viewing angle, 130 vs 107 degrees, an improved night vision as well as support for 5G Wi-Fi. The Dropcam Pro offers the ability to stream 720p video and audio to any PC or smartphone connected to the web. It even offers you the ability to remotely talk back to whoever is nearby the camera.

Unless you own a newer iPhone or iPad, setup requires connecting the camera to a PC in order to properly set it up with your Wi-Fi network. We found this to be very annoying. To make things worse, once the camera is up and running, you cannot change your network settings unless you reconnect it to a PC.

The quality of the night vision is pretty good. In general we liked the quality of the image and the convenience of being able to watch the last 7 days or 30 days of recordings, in case you missed something. While watching your recorded streams, you can go to areas where motion or sound occurred. These markers are not always precise and we came across instances in which the software didn’t detect motion or audio.

We weren’t too pleased to find out that the recorded video playback lacks a basic function that even our defunct VCRs had, the ability to fast-forward. In fact, you can only playback from the cloud at regular speed; that can be very annoying, especially if you are trying to skim through hours of recording looking for a particular event.

Unfortunately, the cloud recording comes at a steep price, $10 a month or $99 a year to view the last 7 days or $30 a month or $300 a year for the last 30 days. If you add that to the cost of the camera and the fact that you might want to purchase 2-3 cameras, the cost can become prohibitive. There is no option to record your videos directly to local storage or to your own cloud storage account.

When you start looking closely at the Dropcam Pro, pricing is not the only issue, there are several issues that make us question the quality and reliability of the product. Throughout our extensive testing period, we came across some quirks that we didn’t like. Unless you have a reliable internet connection with upstream of at least 5Mbps, the Dropcam Pro might struggle in offering a reliable continuous video stream. Additionally, for several months this year, we noticed that on Friday nights the Dropcam Pro would often fail to connect to the server. After talking to their tech support, our only plausible explanation is that their server couldn’t handle the amount of new connections that customers initiate when the weekend starts. It was a real bummer.

We had issues with the ability to automatically turn the night vision on or off, the Dropcam Pro would keep the night vision on even 2-3 hours after sunset in a well lit room. We also noticed that when there is a sudden or fast movement, the Dropcam Pro handles it poorly with a lot of pixelation. While I am not too worried about seeing every pixel of my baby flipping in bed, I surely would want to clearly see the face of an intruder in my apartment. Basically, while the camera is capable of a 720p stream, the video is often extremely compressed, compromising the quality of the image produced.

It’s great to be able to monitor the camera through your smartphone, but the functionalities are limited and in our tests the app often crashed on several devices.

The Dropcam Pro is a great camera with a lot of potential. With some tweaks to its software and some additional new features, it could easily become the best internet surveillance monitoring camera on the market.

We followed the steps that any customer could go through in this situation. We bought a new TV, the TCL 50FS5600. We set it up and connected our Time Warner cable box to the HDMI-1 port. There is no audio. We then tried connecting to the HDMI-2 and HDMI-3, but the problem persisted.

We then called TCL’s technical support and we were advised that they never heard of such a problem. We even escalated the issue to a supervisor in the technical support department. They claimed there is nothing wrong with the TV, so it must be our cable box.

At this point we contacted Time Warner Cable’s technical support. We rebooted the cable box several times and changed several settings on the cable box. Their technician even remotely updated our box with no luck. After a lengthy troubleshooting that went on for several hours, they offered to replace our cable box. We declined that, it wasn’t really Time Warner Cable’s fault in this case.

Knowing that it wasn’t an issue with the cable box, Jonathan decided to take it a step further. Without revealing his identity, he contacted a TCL engineer at the US corporate office. The engineer was able to confirm that there is a known issue with their newer TVs and TCL does not have a solution for it and there is no good workaround.

Our Editor-in-Chief figured out that the HDMI-1 port on this TV is also a DVI port. It is connecting to the cable box as a DVI connection and once the handshake is registered in the TV, there is no way to reset it and the handshake will apply to all other HDMI ports on the TV. Jonathan was able to confirm his theory with the TCL engineer.

To summarize, our investigation shows that if you plug in certain cable boxes into the HDMI-1, the TV will detect it as a DVI connection and won’t give you audio. At this point nothing you do helps. You can reboot both the cable box and the TV, you can try a new HDMI cable, you can reset the TV settings, you can try ports HDMI-2 and HDMI-3, nothing will work. Basically once the TV decides that this input is a DVI, which it shouldn’t do in the first place, there is no way to reset that.

Jonathan devised a quick work around to offer to our readers who can no longer return their TVs. If you plug in RCA audio cables, they will work along your HDMI cable. It’s not ideal, but it works.

We were extremely disappointed with our experience with TCL’s technical support. In addition to being on hold for over an hour to speak to a representative, both the technician and his supervisor were clueless about this issue.

We have attempted to contact TCL for several weeks, but we have not receive an official response yet.

At this time, with no solution from TCL, we do not recommend buying this TV. If you already own it, try to return it and purchase something else.

The S710a comes with many multimedia and phonebook features, such as MP3 support, video recording and play back, as well as the ability to use your stored photo as caller id when receiving calls from your friends. The screen is large and very bright, with 262k colors and a whopping 320×240 screen resolution. The screen comes in handy for dialing outdoors, browsing the internet and viewing your photos and videos. The quality of the photos was good, while the video quality was acceptable for a phone. The audio quality of the speakerphone was pleasing – MP3 playback was crisp and clear. The S710a has 32 megabytes of multimedia storage and supports the Memory Stick Duo for external storage needs.

The S710a is not flawless. The number keys are a bit too small for the average finger and noticed that the menu is often slow in transitioning between different menu pages or even when using the phone in camera mode often falling behind the user’s commands. This problem is similar to one found in the Nokia 6600, but it is more noticeable with the S710a. Another major concern is the location of the microphone. Static cuts into the conversation if a user holds the phone too close to the face or moves it too much while talking. To properly use this phone the microphone needs to be held at least an inch away from the mouth. This is not a very comfortable position.

If you want the latest cool phone with a great look and a nice built-in camera, then the Sony Ericsson S710a is for you, but be ready to use your Bluetooth headset or the speakerphone when making calls.

The PPC-6700 is a feature-packed device that can be a great solution for on-the-go mobile users. When you are on the road you can use the device’s WiFi feature wherever there is a wireless network. This feature worked seamlessly in our tests. More important, thanks to Sprint’s EV-DO network, you can browse the web or check your email without having to wait for slow downloads. We tested the PPC-6700 extensively on the East and West coasts with great results. The device was able to keep the connectivity while traveling in a car or train with no problems. We even ran the portable version of GoToMyPC on the device with impressive results. In fact we were able to log in our desktop computer remotely and perform everyday tasks like checking email with ease.

The 2.88” screen has an above-average brightness when compared to other Windows Mobile devices. Even though it is a smaller screen than average, it still comes with a sharp 320×240 resolution. The screen is great indoors and at night, but we had some difficulties reading it under direct sunlight.

The keyboard, located at the bottom of the unit, slides out sideways and the screen automatically rotates to landscape mode. Each button on the keyboard is raised and larger than average, making it easy to use. You will not end up pressing 2 keys at once, even if you have larger fingers. In our experience the PPC-6700 offers a much better typing experience than the cramped Treo keys. The only downside, similar to the Treo, is that the numeric keys are accessed by pressing a button on the bottom left corner of the keyboard, followed by the actual number. This feature is something to get used to, but it’s not too complicated.

The Bluetooth feature allows you to easily connect with your wireless headset or even to sync to your Bluetooth-enabled notebook. Alternatively you can use the USB cable to connect with your computer. This allows you to recharge the battery in the process. You can also transfer files or store your MP3s using a miniSD card through the built-in slot.

As a phone the PPC-6700 provides clear calls, and easy to dial using the large numbers on the screen. We weren’t too pleased with the speaker feature as it didn’t deliver a clear, loud sound, but you can always work hands-free using a Bluetooth headset.

The PPC-6700 is also available through Verizon as the Verizon Wireless XV6700, which comes with a black casing and minor software differences such as the proprietary Verizon and Sprint applications.

Overall, the PPC-6700 by UTStarcom is a great solution for the business user on the road. We definitely recommend it.