We currently have 40 “Fabs Autobackup 3″ licenses to give away to our mailing list.
If you dont know what Fabs Autobackup is, it is an incredibly useful tool for migrating a users data. It allows you to backup and restore just about everything you would want to migrate to a new install such as My Documents, Browser Favorites (IE, FF, Chrome, Opera), Emails (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird etc..), Address Books, Instant Messenger settings and more.

You may have used Fabs Autobackup 2 which is a free utility, but unfortunately it doesnt support Windows Vista or 7. The author then created version 3 which has many new features and supports Windows Vista and 7, but it became a paid product.

It is an amazing product, I use it all the time and I want 40 lucky winners to also have a copy. I will be announcing the winners on the 9th of September.

What do you have to do to enter this competition?

Just join our newsletter on this page: http://www.technibble.com/newsletter/

If you are reading this article via email. You are already entered into the competition.

It seems that it is essential to have a website for your Computer Repair business is in this day and age. Luckily for us, setting up a website is easier than ever thanks to many pre-existing packages like Wordpress or Joomla. Even without these pre-existing packages, basic web design skills are taught in many computer related courses now days there a huge amount of people know how to get a basic webpage online.

Getting targeted traffic is also much easier thanks to services like Google Adwords. The problem is that creating a website is one thing, creating a website that converts is something else. For most sites a “conversion” would be a making a sale but in our case, a conversion would be a phone call or a booking made through the website.

The reason why many sites dont convert is because they dont answer the questions the visitor wants to know straight away. There has been many studies that say that you have about 7 seconds to get a users attention before they leave the website.

So what are these questions? The questions you need to answer very quickly are:
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Did your client forget their Instant Messenger password? Messenpass is a portable, freeware application designed to show the passwords of a variety of instant messengers. Supported programs include:

• MSN Messenger
• Windows Messenger (In Windows XP)
• Windows Live Messenger (In Windows XP/Vista/7)
• Yahoo Messenger (Versions 5.x and 6.x)
• Google Talk
• ICQ Lite 4.x/5.x/2003
• AOL Instant Messenger v4.6 or below, AIM 6.x, and AIM Pro.
• Trillian
• Trillian Astra
• Miranda
• GAIM/Pidgin
• MySpace IM
• PaltalkScene
• Digsby

Messenpass applies to the current user logged in on the computer and it only works if one of the above programs was set to remember passwords. It can’t be used to grab passwords of other users. When Messenpass is run it automatically detects installed IM programs and decrypts any stored passwords, showing them in the Messenpass window. If it fails to detect any installed IM program they can be manually added with the ‘Select Folder’ option from the File menu. In the main page of Messenpass any passwords can be selected and copied to the clipboard in a tab-delimited format.

Messenpass also has command line options which are shown in a table on the web page.
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A common aspect of the computer repair business that just about all Computer Technicians have to deal with is computer parts. Whether we are building new systems, selling out of a storefront or going onsite and installing them, we all have to deal with computer parts. There are many questions about computer parts on the Technibble forums such as “How much should I charge? What should I carry?”. In this article, I will answer some of these questions.
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CDBurnerXP is a freeware, portable burning application designed to burn CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and HD-DVDs. Its license offers free commercial use as well as private use.

Many free burning applications are short on features or turn out to only be annoying trials but CDBurnerXP is truly free and has plenty of features including creating/burning ISOs, audio CDs, bootable disks, Lightscribe integration, and command line options. It also doesn’t require admin privileges, unlike Nero.

There are two versions, the full-install version and a portable version. Despite what the name suggests, it works on a lot more than XP; supported Windows versions are 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista/2008/Win7 (x86 / x64).
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Why does a “Big Mac” look and taste same at every McDonalds, regardless of which one you go to? What allows a successful business to open hundreds of stores and have them be just as successful as the first? It is their Policies and Procedures. In this article, I will show you why you will want to create your own policies and procedures document.
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Most Computer Business owners will eventually come across a client that needs their computer fixed yesterday. These clients will often bring a computer into your workshop and expect to pick it up just a few hours later. If you dont have any other work to do before them, this usually isnt a problem. However, if you have other computers that are waiting to be put on the bench then you may not be able to get it fixed within a few hours. Here are some handy ways to deal with such a client.
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LAN Speed test is a small, portable application designed to quickly and accurately test LAN speeds. There are two versions, version 1.1 is free for any type of use where version 2.0 is $5 per commercial license but it can be used on unlimited computers. The older v1.1 is slower and has less features, but to just test LAN speed it is just as good as v2.0.

The way it works is that it writes a fairly large file, the default is 100mb but you can choose, to a system across the network. It then clears the windows file cache to keep read times from being skewed too high, reads the file back, clears the cache again, deletes the file, and displays the results.

The application is very portable requiring no install and it doesn’t change the registry. Version 1.1 works on Windows 98SE and up and version 2.0 works on Windows 2000 and up.

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In this article I would like to show you how I book my computer repair jobs as an Onsite Computer Technician. While I am not telling you that this is how you must do it, its a way that has worked great for me over the years.
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LiberKey isn’t technically a repair tool but it is a great and easy way to organize your portable applications on your USB flash drive. It’s a totally free program that you use to build an interface of your portable applications so they are accessible via right-click menu. LiberKey comes with an online catalog of 304 applications available to download, to use the catalog you have to enable file associations in LiberKey first or your browser won’t know what to do. When downloading applications, just choose which ones you want and LiberKey will download them and install them into your library. There is also the option to download a few different versions of LiberKey with pre-loaded applications and additional applications can be added on.
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