A Technibble subscriber and a fellow computer technician, Patrick Croteau of www.logic1.com sent us an interesting tip today. One of his clients was infected with a typical rogue-antivirus which he went out and cleaned up. However, they managed to reinfect themselves later that day and upon checking their internet history he found this:
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In this article I will be reviewing the “Computer Repair Tech Website Builder” package made by Podnutz.com.
The package contains 20 high resolution videos show you how to customize, get a professional looking website online within a couple of hours and includes all of the files and software you need in order to do it. This is my review:
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7 Quick Fix is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to quickly fix common errors that may occur under Windows 7 and is able to re-enable certain parts of the system (such as Task Manager) after a virus attack.
7 Quick Fix can fix 21 common errors including Slow Shutdowns, Slow Thumbnails, Missing System Tray Icons, Missing DVD Drives and more. For the Windows XP equivalent, check out XPQuickFix.
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Your logo and business card are a huge part of your business. It is the image that represents you and often people will even choose a technician over another based on their logo or business card. Our techie “I can figure it out” mind wants to create our own business cards but we need to be careful, as this can be like your clients 16 year old cousin thinking he can fix your clients computer. “How hard can it be?”

If designing isn’t your thing then you definitely should get a professional to make one. In this article I’ll tell you how to get one made at a decent price and have hundreds of custom-made designs to choose from.
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LookInMyPC is a small, portable and freeware tool designed to generate a very comprehensive report of a system and export it to a HTML page. It will display Running Processes, Installed Devices, Drivers, Services, Startup Programs, Windows Updates, TCP/IP Port Usage, Registry Run Entries, System Restore Information, Event Log detail and much much more.

Here is a sample of a report that LookInMyPC produces:
http://www.lookinmypc.com/ReportPage1.htm
http://www.lookinmypc.com/ReportPage2.htm

This application has a nice feature where you can compare previous reports to the current one so you can easily see what changed between then and now.
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I would like to take the time to send a shout to all of our advertisers. These guys help pay the bills around here (we are on a dedicated server, rather than cheap shared hosting) so I’d like to give them an extra plug.
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In this article, I talk about one of my troublesome clients expecting free phone support and an incredibly simple way to deal with them.
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A common problem that occurs with just about all modern Windows operating systems is when a Windows user loses access to their data and settings. For some reason, Windows no longer recognizes a profile belonging to its user and the next time that user logs on, it appears as a fresh account. This can be caused by a hard drive error, joining/leaving a domain, file system issues and a change of username.

Reprofiler is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to reassign the data and settings of a Windows user account to another account. There are ways for technicians to do this with some registry tweaks and by changing permissions (which I have personally had to do a handful of times) but this application makes it much easier so all you have to do is press some buttons.
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Last Friday, I only had a few computers on the bench (which didn’t take long to repair) resulting in me having much of the afternoon free. I took this time “seal some business leaks”.

I like to think of my businesses finances as a Styrofoam cup with holes in the bottom. I pour water into the top of the cup (which represents my income) and some of it leaks out of the holes in the bottom (which represent my expenses). If the cup is filling up faster than it is leaking then I am making a profit.
The cup is always leaking because I have the ongoing expenses of running a business like utilities, fuel and web hosting. It is the web hosting leak I wish to talk about in this article.
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While technically not a “repair tool”, SSDTweaker is an application designed to tweak an operating system to get the most out of a Solid State Drive.
Solid State Drives (SSD) have a massive speed advantage over older hard drives because there are no moving parts. However, one of the disadvantages of SSD’s is that each data block on the drive has a limited amount of times it can be overwritten (about 10,000 vs a Hard Drives 1-5 million cycles). Windows constantly writes information to the hard drive such as indexing the files to make file searches faster, creating a page file and more. This will reduce the performance of an solid state drive over time.

This is where SSDTweaker comes in, SSDTweaker allows you to tweak the following:
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