Software tip: How to save yourself at least $250 -- Dia Diagram Editor

Watts Up With That? ^ | Dec 15, 2010 | Anthony Watts

[Still Thinking]

I thought Visio came built into Office anymore.

[Darth Reardon]

Ubuntu version is 32 bit it seems..... May have same problem with Windows.,

Don't see how this would be a problem unless you were making a REALLY big diagram (or you had a 64 bit install without the compatibility libraries).

[tophat9000]

I used DIA but the problem I find is it can not import or export in to Visio format.... so you can not edit or update other visio doc and others can not edit your unless they install DIA

[sionnsar]

Thanks first I have heard of it.

Me too. Downloading right now. If it works well enough (and I'm not too demanding) I might skip the hassle of trying to get corporate Visio reinstalled after the laptop HD was replaced.

[Marine_Uncle]

Thanks E. I no longer have any Linux machines. Just one old server that still contains one of the first releases of Red Hat Linux. I use the big metal box as a stand for smaller PC that I will probably dump soon. Been dumping a lot of old hard ware of lately.

[martin_fierro]

[poobear]

Hey ShadowAce. Personal question here and I am NOT Tech smart. My older HP personal computer jammed up and would not boot. My normal technician took it to his office to pull my data out then restore it to my new PC. He then called to tell me that he couldn’t. I believe he was certain that all I kept on there was pictures and trivial bs. My Maxtor back up was also not functional he said.

I find this unacceptable. I have 6 years of data from my Business on there and this is really going to hurt if everything I have been backing up all these years is dead. My Contractor’s QuickBooks can be restored up to the beginning of this year, but why do I need to loose everything else.

Any suggestions please? Thank you.

[ShadowAce]

It's hard to give suggestions long distance without seeing the actual hardware :)

If you normally trust your technician, then I'd have to assume he knows what he's doing. Perhaps he hasn't tried to pull the drive out and mount it as a slave to a working machine? That would be my first step.

If that fails, and your business data is worth several thousand dollars, then take the drives to a data recovery service and they will be able to recover most, if not all, of it. It will cost you, though.

[poobear]

Thanks. The point is I don’t trust my technician. Over the last 6,7 years I’ve been able to ghost/slave my data over to new hard drives (for a fee). This guy took about an hour and said basically no.

Looks like there are several data recovery services in the Orlando area. Wish me luck!

Thanks again.

[TexasRepublic]

I used Dia in Linux to create a network diagram. I was able to export the diagram to a .jpg format that could be imported into Microsoft Word. Dia is a nice enough program. I haven’t used Visio since it first came out, so I can’t really compare the two. I’m sure Visio is more slick, but anyone should test drive Dia before coughing up $250 to Microsnot.