USBDeview is a portable, freeware tool designed to show you the currently connected USB devices with a good amount of detail. It can also show you a history of devices that are not currently connected but have been at some point in the past. You can also output this information to a HTML/TXT file.

You can change how devices connected behave such as disabling/enabling them or making a file run when a particular device is plugged in (for example, a bat script that dumps the contents of a USB thumb drive when it is plugged in).

This application also has the ability to gather this information from a remote computer or even mutliple computers at one time and initiate commands such as disabling a device.
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There are plenty of business books out there that will tell you that your business should service some sort of niche market. What is a niche market? Wikipedia describes it as:

“A niche market is a focused targetable portion (subset) of a market.

By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.”

Many business books also say that you should thoroughly research the niche before you start a niche business to make sure that it is profitable and enough clients will exist. In the computer service field there is a huge amount of niches such as:

• Repairing networks for huge corporations with 500+ computers
• Repairing computers/networks for the military or in hostile areas
• Servicing commercial computers and systems like Point-of-Sale systems and barcode scanners

There are countless possibilities in the service field. In the hardware field there are options such as high end gaming machines, point-of-sale computers and many other computers to fill a niche.

In this article I am going to write about what I believe to be a bad computer hardware niche and what I believe to be a good hardware niche.
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Earlier this week I posted an article called Questions and Answers #2 requested members to ask me a question about the computer business that has been on their mind. We got some great questions and here are the answers.
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I wouldn’t usually have a website as a repair tool of the week, but this site is so useful it warrants an exception. Most of us already know of online virus scanners like AVG’s Ewido and Trend Micros Housecall and VirusTotal.com is also an online virus scanner. However, VirusTotal.com is designed to scan a single file using the database of many different antivirus brands including AntiVir, Avast!, AVG, ClamAV, FProt, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, NOD32, Panda, Sophos, Symantec (Norton), Trend Micro, Virus Blaster and more.

This website is a great way to check a suspicious file that comes up clean with your antivirus, but you still suspect it is malicious and want to check it against other scanners. It is also a great way to check to see if your antivirus has detected a clean file as a virus (called a “false positive”).
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In the past few weeks I have had many readers ask me computer related questions through comments, forum private messages or direct emails. When I was first starting out, I was lucky enough to have my parents who are both self employed to bounce business questions off of.

Today, you guys can ask me almost any question you want in regards to the computer business and I will have the answers in Fridays post.

These can be “what would you do if…” type questions. Questions about brands, competition, marketing, whatever!

Please refrain from commenting on other peoples comments as it makes it easier to answer questions.

To ask a question, just click the “Comment” link below this text. As always, you don’t have to sign up to comment and you can even post anonymously.

Fire away.

A common question that I see being asked in the Technibble forums is what sort of warranty they should provide. Many technicians have different sorts of warranties and really comes down to what the business is willing to cover.
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Asterisk Key is a freeware tool designed to reveal passwords that have been asterisked out on both dialog boxes and webpages. I tested this by recovering Outlook Express, Thunderbird email and Internet Explorer passwords with success (no Firefox though). This is a great tool to run before formatting system to fetch those clients long forgotten passwords.
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Something I have noticed that prevents a lot of people from starting their own business is that they believe that they need to know it all before they start a business. Let me tell you a little secret, don’t need to know it all, you just need to know enough and make it look like you know what you are doing.
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Monitor Tester is a portable, freeware application designed for testing a computer screen. Its a simple application, but effective. Monitor Tester tests the screen by allowing you to view a variety of patterns to make a screen fault obvious. It can also be used to help you calibrate working monitors.
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If you have been in the onsite repair business for a while you have probably had someone ask you whether you do computer training. I get these a few times a month and I nearly always take these jobs. You can take these training jobs at your regular repair rate or create a new “teaching rate”. Personally, my teaching rate is a little cheaper just because this type of work is so incredibly easy.
In this article, we’ll cover a little bit about getting into computer training.
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