Gadget Man’s Pick of the Month Jerome Smith, DDS

These days our lives are often tied to our computers, or at least to some degree of dependence on them. Wonderful things, these computers—that is when they work. When they don’t, it can feel a lot like running into a brick wall. There are times when we pause in distress, when some terrible event has happened. Perhaps it was an inappropriate mouse click. Files are gone; the computer won’t start. Something awful has happened, and our immediate desire is to turn back the clock and return to a better time—the time right before the accident.

This yearning to step back in time and fix things inspired the engineers at Adaptec. They began an incredible project, namely to design software that would give us another chance, where decisions would not be so final. An opportunity to back out of a disaster, without losing hours of hard work and trying to figure out why your wonderful computer no longer worked, was needed. After years of hard work, Adaptec finally succeeded and produced GoBack.

With GoBack on your computer you have the peace of mind knowing that you are being protected. You are being protected against your own mistakes, against virus damage, against the unknown. When problems strike, you have the immediate option of stepping back to a time when your computer worked.

GoBack does have limits, so don’t forget to make regular backups. GoBack isn’t going to help if smoke is pouring out of your computer (i.e., the hardware has failed). It isn’t meant to take you back to something you saved last year. It is, however, designed to take you back to virtually any moment in the recent past. GoBack is incredibly easy to use. It can do three simple feats. First, it can revert your hard disk to the way it was a few minutes, hours, even days ago—a truly simple yet great way to fix many problems. Second, GoBack can create a backup after you realize you need it. Have you ever wished you had made a backup five minutes ago? Now you can! And third, GoBack lets you get back that accidentally overwritten or deleted file. Wouldn’t you like to be protected against clicking “Save” instead of “Save As” or deleting the wrong file? The magic of GoBack is that it does what it does automatically. You do not have to remember to do anything. In summary, once GoBack is installed it quietly works in the background. This insures that you can quickly and easily:

Get your computer to start again, even if Windows won’t boot. Get back a “lost” version of a file. Restore your computer to the way it was—to virtually any moment in the recent past. Make a backup after you realize you need it.

Very simply, GoBack provides added peace of mind. Should you need to, you have the ability to step back in recent time and recover from a wide range of problems. Best of all, once GoBack is installed, you don’t need to take any further action. That is, until you need it. GoBack is all about Protecting the Power to Move Ahead™.

Visit www.adaptec.com for more information. GoBack is available through most major computer software retailers and catalogs. Contact Jerome Smith, at jeromes486@worldnet.atty.net

Is quiet sleep just a shot away? The name for this procedure is a jawbreaker--palatopharyngovideostroboscopy. According to a recent report by a Walter Reed research team, the procedure it measures--injecting the soft palate with a sclerosing agent, may be an inexpensive, nonsurgical alternative for silencing snoring.

The team examined 27 patients after "injection snoreplasty," sodium tetradecyl sulfate (Sotradecol, Elkins-Sinn), injected into the topically anesthetized soft palate. It caused little pain or discomfort and 25 of the 27 patients who participated (or their sleepmates) said snoring had decreased or stopped. The soft palate became so stiff that 13 patients couldn't emit a measurable palatal flutter sound when they tried, Dr. Scott Brietzke told the American Academy of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery at a meeting in Washington.