By Mike Hodges, Treasurer, Tampa PC Users Group
mphs@aol.com

Our Member at Large, Mary Sheridan, opened the meeting in her inimitable way and provided us an invaluable update on the current PC viruses and remedies and the after-effects of certain spy-ware programs and other counter-measures that one can take to best protect one’s PC activities. Mary also extended an invitation to all to attend the Florida annual users group weekend conference to be held in Kissimmee starting at 6 pm on Friday, March 5. Mary then announced and introduced the elected officers for 2004, who remained unchanged from 2003. Mike Hodges, the incoming and outgoing treasurer, announced that the goal was to achieve 50 paid-up members for 2004 and already seven members had signed up in January. Mike then requested that members volunteer to support the Board as program chair or in any other capacity.

Our presenter, Dave Dabney from LC Technology International of Clearwater, then provided us a very informative live demonstration of his company’s data recovery/restoration software products. First, however, Dave afforded us some good tips that would help us not require the use of his products as in “prevention is better than cure.”

• Partition your hard drive and separate your data from your system drive.
• Take your memory card out of your camera before air travel to avoid x-ray memory dumps.
• Beware of the low battery warning and remove memory card before completely draining your battery.
• Do not edit pictures on your camera card in camera. First download to PC.
• Use multiple spare cards instead of deleting a few unwanted ones so as to make room for a few more pictures.
• Ensure flash cards and memory cards are properly formatted.
• Protect your memory cards by placing in wrappers and not baring contacts.
• Take similar precautions for your PDA memory.
• Copy files by command as opposed to drag and drop copying.
• Back-up your data frequently on to external devices.
• Employ a UPS
• Back-up your important files not once but twice
• Beware of those large media files that write their way across reams of previously good data.
• Save data files to a CD frequently.

When any of the above fails or you are having difficulty accessing data, then LC-Tech can be your safe haven and lead you to recovery. Viruses and power failures cause most memory failures that LC-Tech software can restore for most users nine out of ten times.

Dave stated that LC Tech prefers to walk customers through their products rather than let them struggle alone. Customers are sold more on working from a strong knowledge base rather than being brought around after they may have stumbled. He encouraged potential customers to call (727) 449-0891 and be guided through the demo to be found at http://www.lc-tech.com. All are encouraged to call and have the demo demonstrated. LC-Tech is an international company well positioned in Europe and the USA. LC-Tech has supplied significant recovery to many US Federal agencies. Once it took a week to restore one terabit of data for the US Navy, but most jobs are completed same day. The product is currently very stable and the current version was issued over two years ago. The first product was issued in 1996. LC-tech is a major recoverer of damaged physical drives as a depot of last resort as well as a front runner for remote data recovery utilizing the LC-Tech software. A true endorsement of the product is that the latest camera memory cards, namely Ultra-Extreme cards, have the LC-Tech product rescue-pro installed by the card manufacturer. Photo recovery currently keeps LC-Tech real busy. Their local lab-office is located just north of Countryside mall in Clearwater and employs ten at that location. The LC-Tech products are all downloadable from their web site and are priced as follows: RESCUE.PRO for $39.99, PHOTORECOVERY for $39.99, FILE RECOVERY PRO for $99.95.

Our Thanks go to Dave Dabney for a most interesting and valuable presentation enjoyed by all.

Our door prize winners were John Witmer, who won the Encarta Reference Library CD, and runners up Merle Nicholson and Bob Davis who, won TPCUG T-shirts. u