NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, March 2009
The Deals Column
By Bob Click, The Deals Making Man
bobclick@mindspring.com
(click to email author)

Suggested Reading
I’m sure you’ve heard about some of the innovations that United Parcel Service has created in the interest of saving money, such as calculating their delivery routes with a minimum of left turns. This article will inform you of many other ways they are saving money, some that will surprise you http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212900815. Everything you can think of is under scrutiny. However, the most interesting part is further into the article.

Feedback
I certainly had plenty of feedback from my experience with Best Buy. It seems that many others have had a bad experience with Best Buy and wrote to tell me about it. My preference for that type of store was Circuit City, but that has come to an end. I’m sorry to bid them farewell because Circuit City always treated me right.

A Bit About Work
My wife and I have worked some great trade shows lately. One was the Fun Show, which is also called the Coin Show. I sure saw many dollars worth of coins etc. displayed by people from all over the US. Police continually patrolled the show floor and they now have police on horseback roamed the parking lot to prevent any robberies there, which have happened in the past. In fact, there have even been vendors who were followed by robbers to a distant town where they were robbed when they stopped at a motel for the night. Obviously, the robbery was substantial.

Then came the Surf Show, which happens twice a year. It’s a large show and draws attendees from the US states with beaches, and from the Caribbean. Fashions make up much of the show, but there are lots of other things to see, not to mention the models (mmmm).

On the heels of the Surf Show came the “Shot Show” which occupied 1.1 million square feet of exhibit area in the West complex of Orange County Convention Center. http://www.shotshow.org. I saw a shotgun with a price tag of $100,000 and that booth also had a deal for four assorted shotguns and rifles for only $400,000. Too bad my Visa limit was too low for that. Those guns with their GOLD triggers would have made a nice gift for my wife’s husband. The show had about 25,000 attendees and security was tight with all kinds of guns and knives all over the place. Most of the attendees I talked to said they were unable to see the entire show in one day. Others said they were back again to keep looking because you always find something you didn’t see the first trip through. That is so true of trade shows.

I’ll also give you the URL for the IAAPA Attractions Expo http://www.iaapa.org which is a show we worked in November that is all about amusement park rides and other attractions at carnivals. It’s always fun to work it and some of the rides are set up and working right there on the show floor. There is as much as 65 feet of height in certain areas of that building if needed. There were many inflatable attractions this year and lots of food exhibits (Burp).

The Power Gen Show was extremely interesting with everything from small to very large generating systems http://www.power-gen.com/index.html. Three vendors offered giant windmill generators, GE, Mitsubishi and Vesta with impressive movies illustrating the construction. If I had one of those, I could power the entire neighborhood. You might also be interested in the Electronic House Expo that will be in Orlando in March. http://www.ehxweb.com/

How About Repairing That File
DataNumen Inc. has released Advanced Access Repair 2.0. If .MDB files are corrupt or damaged, this powerful repair engine will recover the data with precision. The performance of Advanced Access Repair is improved and supports MS Access 2007 and Windows Vista. If the .MDB files are corrupt or damaged in some way, Access can neither open the files nor recognize any data in them. Advanced Access Repair uses advanced technologies to scan the corrupt or damaged Microsoft Access databases (.MDB files) and recover the data in them as much as possible.

Advanced Access Repair 2.0 is based on a comprehensive understanding of the Access MDB database format. The advanced algorithm of this powerful tool allows you to recover every possible item in the MDB database files because the recovery process does not rely on the structure of the original corrupt or damaged MDB database file. Sometimes the structure is completely damaged and cannot be recognized, but Advanced Access Repair is still able to analyze the raw MDB database file byte by byte and recover most of the data.

Advanced Access Repair 2.0 can successfully repair Microsoft Access 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007 databases, recover the structure and records of the tables in Access databases, or recover MEMO and OLE fields. It offers numerous features that are not available, or only partially available, in other repair engines. Among those features is support for the new Access 2007 format, batch recovery, command line support, shell integration, and drag & drop support. Advanced Access Repair 2.0 can also recover indexes, auto-number fields and relations, can output repaired MDB files in different formats, and can search for MDB database files on the local computer according to special criteria. Password encrypted Access databases? Recovered; deleted records and tables; no problem.

Advanced Access Repair 2.0 runs under all versions of Microsoft Windows, including Vista, and supports all versions of Microsoft Access including Microsoft Access 2007. A single-user license costs $299.95 (US). Volume buyers are entitled to discounts. They are offering a 10% discount if you use the code DNC-SGKO-DG when ordering. The code is good through March. Further information on the product, as well as a free trial copy is available from http://www.datanumen.com/aar/.

Direct download link:
http://www.datanumen.com/aar/aar.exe

Keep An Eye On That Network
Softinventive Lab, the developer of software for IT Administrators, introduced Total Network Monitor, the program which enables IT Administrator to be continuously informed about every single moment of their network’s performance. If there is any error or failure in a network computer’s performance, the program immediately alerts you by sending a message to your E-mail, Jabber account or Event log. Total Network Monitor 1.0.1 helps to prevent serious bottlenecks and the program builds a detailed report on the type and time of any failure or error that occurred.

You can check any aspect of each utility, server or file system, HTTP, FTP, SMTP/POP3, IMAP, Event Log, Service State, Registry, and many others at any time. Total Network Monitor allows you to create monitor lists and customize them as much as possible according to your needs. It gives you all the tools for convenient monitoring of your network devices’ state and has a number of specific probes checking the remote utilities and server’s state. For your convenience all probes are divided into three main groups; Internet, Windows and Miscellaneous. The program enables you to build a demonstrative network map, which is handy in network control.

Total Network Monitor 1.0.1 runs under Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server platforms including Vista, and costs $145/112 euro per license for one installation, $115/89 euro per license for 2 to 5 installations, $95/73 euro per license for 6 to 10 installations. They offer a 20% discount on request. http://info@softinventive.com

Product page link:
http://www.softinventive.com/products/total-network-monitor/

Download link:
http://www.softinventive.com/downloads/tnm-setup.exe

Use This Instead of Print Screen
Here is a suggestion by a reader who preferred not to be mentioned: When you want to save what’s on your screen, many use Print Screen to save it to the clipboard. However, you don’t always get everything you want, such as the curser, using that method. Why not try FastStone Capture, which is a freebie. The following is from their Web site: “FastStone Capture 6.3, Shareware (last update: 2008-10-15): A powerful lightweight, yet full featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions, and even scrolling windows web pages. It also allows you to record screen activities and sound into video files.”

FastStone also offers other software so see http://www.faststone.org/index.htm for a description of their various products.

That's it for this month. I’ll have some more new product announcements on my Web site that didn’t offer discounts. Meet me here again next month if your editor permits. This column is written to make user group members aware of special offers or freebies I have found or arranged, and my comments should not be interpreted to encourage, or discourage, the purchase of any products, no matter how enthused I might sound. Bob (The Cheapskate) Click . Visit my Web site at http://www.dealsguy.com.