MM Enterprises, Inc.

 FindTheBest.com:  Double-Click founder Kevin O’Connor is behind this interesting site which seems to provide consolidated comparisons of categorized items. Designed for consumers looking for purchasing advice, it seems to provide an accurate evaluation of items and services in many categories. The top-most categories include: Auto, Education, Electronics & Computers, Finance, Health, Home & Family, Reference, Software, Sports & Recreation, Travel & Lifestyle and Newest Comparisons. You can see that this effort is fairly comprehensive and this site deserves your attention before making any purchasing decisions.

System Restore is a well known mechanism for restoring a computer to a prior state when its performance deteriorates.  This is usually the first thing to try when infected with malware.  The other oft-recommended procedure is the removal of any anti-virus software but we’ll save that debate for another blog.

On June 29, 2011 a client complained of long boot times, sluggish performance and an inability to access Gmail on a laptop.  The first thing noticed was that it was processing Microsoft Updates.  We waited for that to finish but still could not access GMail or any of the Google Gadgets on the iGoogle homepage. The spinning “wait” icon just kept spinning with nothing displayed.  A newly added Google Gadget also failed to initialize.

Knowing that we were about to start time-consuming processes on the laptop, the client was offered another computer so he could read his Gmail.  Surprisingly this computer displayed the same problems accessing the iGoogle page.  The iGoogle home page contained a link indicating that one could “restore” a Google account to an earlier state. (Google restore?)  We clicked it and that fixed it. It seems that the future with cloud computing might include “Google restore” as well as System Restore.

In the book “In the Plex” the author indicated that Google often selects sample sets of individuals for system tests. Perhaps this was just one of those? We hadn’t seen the “Restore” option shown so prominently before.