If the data is valuable you can contact a company like ACS Data
Recovery and they can retrieve it for you.
If you want to do it yourself you can call OnTrack's support line (800-872-2599). They have less than $100 package EasyRecovery™ Lite 6.1 - Individual Edition that let's you recover files on your own.
A PC Magazine article "Hard Drive Healers … Getting Your Data Back" describes the process in easy to understand terms.
You can if you have an S-Video connector. S-Video-In allows you to connect laptops to a television or camcorder or VCR to be transmit their signal and able able to view them on the laptop's display. S-Video inputs use a four-pin jack to receive video signals from camcorders, gaming consoles, TV, or any device that has an S-Video out port. The S in S-Video stands for separate: S-Video connections transmit the chrominance (color) and luminance (brightness) portions of a video signal along different paths, allowing them to be processed separately. This is a common way to display content from a digital camcorder or any device that has an S-Video Out port.
S-Video Out: Connects a plasma or newer TV to your notebook to display video content streaming from the notebook. The most common way to connect a TV to a notebook, S-Video Out uses a four-pin jack to send signals from your notebook to your TV or anything that accepts S-Video In.
This feature is not standard to all laptops, so you need to check the feature list to make sure it is included if this is something you whish to do.
Always use a soft cloth. There are companies that make special cloths that can be used.
There is a screen cleaner from Kensington that costs less than four dollars. You can use eye glass cleaner. Klear Screen works really well. I have used it for years with great results. It includes a special cloth and/or a spray or special formula dampened cloth.
Advantus makes ScreenKleen. Premoistened cleaning wipes. It removes dirt, oil, smudges, and fingerprints from computer screens.
You can even make up your own solution. A 50/50 isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and water mixture. Use it with a MICRO-FIBRE cloth
Kimberly-Clark makes Kimwipes.
There is no one product or way to clean your laptops display, so experiment and find the one that works best for you.
People keep lots of personal information on their laptops, some of these files would cause damage should your laptop get stolen or an unauthorized person access your laptops. One way to prevent this from happening is to delete these type files when they are no longer needed.
Webroot Software, Inc.'s, Window Washer, is such a tool. It has a feature they call Permanent Bleaching, which completely overwrites files with random characters to make them unrecoverable. This feature is so powerful it exceeds the tough standards of the DOD and NSA.
The product costs $29.95 and will run on Win 98 or later OS's and requires at least 266 MHz CPU.
Games and laptops can sometime be diametrically opposed. Some games require lots and lots of RAM and specialized graphics chips. These are often not part of the typical laptop configuration.
To determine what your games needs you need to check the Minimum Systems Requirements. You can find these either on the box that included the CDROM that came with the game or on the game manufacturer's website. Typically the younger set, eight or younger's games are not too CPU, RAM or graphics intensive and they often will work. But still check.
If your kid, usually boys, plays the latest games then you might need at least a Centrino 2.0Ghz, 1.5 GB or more RAM and 128MB dedicated RAM. You might need to turn down the resolution and leave those antialiasing and anisotrophic options off. If you have serious $$$ to burn go for the Dell XPS series or Alienware instead, they come with a powerful graphics chip, the GeForce Go 7800 GT. You might even consider a desktop with tons of RAM (2GB+) and the latest graphics chip. Better to get this type system than to listen to the complaints about the "crummy" computer.
