Today, while I was at a local shopping center with my fiancée I quickly ducked into a computer store to have a look around. While I was there I found this:
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If you are doing any computer repair work for residential clients, there is always a possibility of us running into some strange people. One poor Comcast technician has this story.

News post from LivingstonDaily.com

“A [Howell, Michigan] man was ordered to stand trial on charges he exposed his genitals to a computer technician trying to fix his slow Internet service.

However, the witness said, Trikes then exposed his genitals, which made the technician extremely uncomfortable, so the technician quickly left the home and reported the incident to his supervisor, who called police.”

Scary stuff. While the computer technicians here on Technibble haven’t had anything this bad, we do have our fair share of computer technician stories.

Guest Post by Chris Kight. Chris is a preacher and a Computer Technician in Missouri.

This article will seem like nonsense to technicians that have been around for a while, but is mainly geared for newer techs.
Earning your client’s respect may not at first seem like an important aspect of the job. Why bother going out of your way to earn their respect when you’re only with them for a hour and you’ll probably never see them again, right? Wrong! Even if you WILL never see them again (a common misinterpretation of some new techs) you still need to offer them your respect to get respect in return.
One top reason why you will need to earn their respect:
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Are you prepared? Of course you’re prepared to take care of your clients’ needs. But are you prepared in the event that you have to take some time off from work? What I mean by this is, do you have a way for your current clients to get their computer needs fulfilled in the event that you are out of work for a week or two? Because of course, you want to keep them. You’ve worked long and hard to keep them as clients but it would take less than a week for them to leave you for your competition.
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It was initially my intention to write my first article about hard drive data recovery. Sometimes, though, a battle plan doesn’t survive the initial encounter. It so happens I read Tim Biden’s excellent blog post about online backup, the same day I had a situation with a client involving hard drive failure. I screwed up, and here’s what we can learn from it.
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Most computer technicians that service the residental market spend much of their time removing adware from clients computers. Today I came across a interview a secrutity blog did with a adware author. Its a good read and allows you to see inside the mind of such a person.

http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware-author

Cray has launched an affordable supercomputer which starts at $25,000 and it is available to be purchased at Amazon.com.

The model of the supercomputer is CX1 and it is a blade server that can take up to 8 blades according to the report at guardian.co.uk. These blades could have one or two Intel Xeon processors. Those who want more power could link three CX1s together.

Richard Dracott of Intel said, “Cray’s CX1 system will bring many HPC capabilities to the office that were previously confined to the datacenter, enabling more users to employ supercomputing to help them solve some of their most difficult computational problems.”

Source: Guardian.co.uk

According to the data that were collected by The NDP Group, Mac notebooks costs over twice as much as a computer with a Windows operating system.

The disparity between these two types of computers widened only in the last few months according to eWeek. It notes that, “If Apple is going to continue its market share gains, or simply maintain that 8.5 percent U.S. share, prices must go down and configurations bulk up,” eWeek notes. “The math is simply undeniable.”

The article at Electronista notes that the average Windows notebook is $700 today but an Apple system is above $1,500.

Source: Electronista

According to a report that was posted at Information Week, most of the business customers of HP downgrade their computers from Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system to Windows XP.

Chris Flores, who is the official blogger of Microsoft Vista, said that over 180 million Vista licenses were sold. Information Week notes that this news raises questions about the sales claims of the Vista operating system since businesses cannot buy just a Windows XP system without buying a license for Windows Vista.

Dell and other computer makers are also shipping these “downgraded” systems.

Windows XP was officially retired by Microsoft last month.

Source: Information Week

Techrepublic.com has posted an article about a survey that was conducted by KACE, a company which makes systems management appliances.

KACE surveyed 1,100 IT managers and they found that sixty percent of them have no plans to use Windows Vista. Forty-two percent said that they would consider Linux and Apple as an alternative OS (operating system). Ninety-two percent of them answered that their plans did not change when Microsoft released the first service pack for Vista.

The author of the article, Larry Dignan, notes that KACE made the survey in order to pitch its KBox appliance which is designed to manage multiple OSs.

Source: Tech Republic