Someone in our forums recently brought up the topic of press releases the other day and I feel its something we should definitely cover. In this article, we’ll show you the secret of creating an effective press release, how it should be written and how to go out distributing them.
Read the rest of this entry »

Z-Cron is a freeware (for personal use) and powerful task scheduler. Although Windows does come with a task scheduler but you would hardly call it user friendly and it isn’t nearly as powerful as Z-Cron.
Z-Cron has a large list of tasks that you can schedule, but here are some of the highlights:

• Copy, Move & Delete Files - Useful for backup devices
• Kill - Closes a file
• Download - Downloads a file via HTTP
• Mail - Send an email with SMTP
• Ping - Pings an IP address to test for connectivity
• Reboot - Reboots the computer
• Remote Shutdown - Remotely shut down a computer
• Wake on LAN - Remotely power up a computer
• Connect/Disconnect - Connects or disconnects a dialup connection
• Watch - Monitors a program. If the program “dies”, it will be restarted
• And more, here is the complete list

An example of what you could do with Z-Cron is to get it to start a backup on a remote computer and have it email you when it finishes; or, if you were in a job that managed many computers on a network, you could set a master computer to turn on all the computers in the building in the morning and shut them down at night. There are many possibilities.
Read the rest of this entry »

In part 1 of our Automation with AutoIT tutorial, we showed you how to run silent commands using AutoIT. In this article we are going to show you how to install applications that don’t have any silent install options. If you found the last article hard, don’t be turned off as this one is easier.

For this article I will be installing Winamp without using a silent switch.
Although inamp actually has a silent switch we will be doing it the other way sake of showing you how to do it for programs without them. This is where AutoIT really shines.
Read the rest of this entry »

In our last “computer repair tool of the week” article we posted about the application called Universal Silent Switch Finder which has the ability to find hidden install switches. The advantage of knowing what these hidden switches are is that it allows you to control the way a piece of software is installed. For example, if we were to install something like Spybot and we used its “silent” switch, it would install Spybot without ever showing us a install screen or asking us any questions. The main advantage of this is that it allows us to automate what we do.
Lets say that you install a certain set of software on every system that you sell like Spybot, Ad-Aware and AVG antivirus. You can make this a 1 click process and let the application that you created do all the work. In this article, we’ll show you how to do it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Most software is easy enough to install. You just open the setup file, press next, next, next, finish and your done. However, what if you want to install software on hundreds of computers? or multiple applications on a single computer? Computer Technicians frequently encounter these situations and write their own scripts to automatically install the software by making using special switches.

However, its hard to find out what those special switches actually are, this is where Universal Silent Switch Finder comes in.
Universal Silent Switch Finder is a small, standalone application designed to find out what switches can be used on a certain installer. From there, you can create your own .BAT files to automate the install process.
Read the rest of this entry »

Advertising isn’t just limited to Newspaper, TV and Radio. There are many other publications that you can put your advertising in to supplement your traditional advertising that can be just as, or even more effective than the traditional media.

Here are three advertising mediums that are often overlooked.
Read the rest of this entry »

EndItAll is a small utility designed to close or kill all non-essential processes on a system.
This tool is great to use on slow computers which are slowing down your computer repair tasks. It is also great to use before a virus scan because it frees up more system resources for the scanner, and it can kill currently active viruses and trojans. Some other great uses for this application is to free up resources for high-end games or dvd burning.

A nice feature of this application is the ability to protect processes that are non-essential, but you want to keep open anyway.
Read the rest of this entry »

The following is a paid review. However, it completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid.

The folks over at HandyRecovery.com sent me a copy of their software “Handy Recovery 4.0″ to play with and review.
I will begin by talking about what it is. Handy Recovery is data recovery software designed to restore files that have been accidentally deleted or where damaged by virus attacks, software faults or from deleted/formatted partitions.

It works under 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista (has earned the certified for Vista logo). It supports all Windows file systems and hard/floppy drives and unlike much of the recovery software out there, it can recover from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Multimedia and SD Cards. It can also recover from compressed and encrypted files on NTFS drives.

Now, onto my review of the software.
Read the rest of this entry »

There have been a few times where I have been called out to onsite repair jobs that only took 10 minutes to complete. However, I need to charge a minimum of 30 minutes to 1 hour (depending on distance) to cover the driving time and cost. Now if I were the client and I was slugged the full hour fee for a 10 minute job, I would feel like I didn’t get my moneys worth.

So how do we make our clients feel like they got their moneys worth? Always provide value.
Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I came across a clients computer that was getting the infamous Blue Screen of Death (aka BSOD). However, since the computer had the “Automatically Restart if the event of a bluescreen” option switched on, the system would restart and the blue screen disappear too quickly for me to read. Most technicians will just go into Safe Mode and switch this off, but what if you cant get into Safe Mode? What happens if the option to “Disable Automatic Restart” doesn’t show in the F8 menu either?
I had this happen to me and I found a way around it. Read on.
Read the rest of this entry »