Technibble » The Biz

Antivirus Products Being Released on USB Drives

Bryce Whitty — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:51:39 +0000

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:

It appears that antivirus companies have begun to sell their products on USB thumb drives. This is a great idea now that Netbooks are more common since many of them don’t have an optical drive. In fact, some antivirus companies such as Panda Security are making a Netbook specific versions of their antivirus products which are lighter on resources and come on a USB drive.

Another great thing about antivirus products coming on a USB drive is that the installation of the antivirus product (which usually takes ages) would happen much faster, since it is usually much faster than installing something from a CD.

Lastly, at the end of the day the customer is left with a USB drive which they could use for other purposes.

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Antivirus Products Being Released on USB Drives

Do Not Expose Your Genitals To The Computer Technician

Bryce Whitty — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:35:05 +0000

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.

The technician testified that he went to Trikes’ Pinckney Road home Oct. 17, after Trikes complained his Internet service was too slow.

While at the defendant’s home, the technician said, Trikes began discussing pornographic Web sites that he had visited online as well as a sexually explicit video that he said he found in a gas station garbage can. The technician said he began talking about his date later that evening “to ease the uncomfortableness” of the situation.

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.

Earning Clients Respect

Bryce Whitty — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:02:13 +0000

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:

They will appreciate you more. Clients that appreciate the tech will be less likely to complain about your prices, and will be more inclined to call you again for help. They will understand when you make a mistake and be in general in a better mood to ask you to help instead of someone else. They will be more considerate, and not try to call you at 1 in the morning, or press on about an appointment when you have an important computer technician dinner with the president.

How NOT to earn respect:

By calling them stupid when they are talking about the tower and say that their ‘processor’ is messed up.
By taking a personal phone call when working in their home
By interrupting them every 30 seconds to text on your phone
By checking your e-mail/doing personal things with their computer.
By in any way wasting their time, energy, money, ext
By exhibiting laziness, stupidness or any other act that someone would find troublesome.

Just keep one key thing in mind and you’ll be safe: treat them like you would expect to be treated!

Are you prepared?

Tim Biden — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 02:37:35 +0000

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.

I recently ran into a small issue when my parents came in to town to defrost during their frigid winter temperatures of -24 degrees Fahrenheit. With them living in the exact opposite corner of the country, I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could.

I work alone so I don’t have any employees to take care of my clients and I really don’t have anybody else in the trade that I can send them to. So what did I do with my clients who needed help?

I hoped and prayed that they wouldn’t have any problems. This isn’t exactly the best plan.
I attempted to divert all of my work to certain days that my folks knew that I would have to work. This again doesn’t always work because sometimes issues are urgent.
I worked while my folks were here. This again won’t always work because there may be times when you (or I) are simply unable to work.

So, after much consideration, my best recommendations would be to:

Hire an employee to do the work and bill the clients. This serves 2 purposes. In addition to having a trusted employee to take care of clients in your absence, if you train him or her up well enough that you can send them out on their own, you suddenly have 2 sources on income instead of just 1.
Find somebody in your local area who knows approximately what your clients need and set up a deal with them. This way, you know that your clients will be taken care of, and you can do some revenue sharing (like a 75-25 split) for them doing the work. But you have to know that they are trustworthy and won’t steal your clients!
Hope and pray that you don’t end up in a car accident, jail, or even have to take a vacation. Any of these could land you completely out of work for a while.

So after this past week, I am seriously going to work on getting to the point where I can hire on another set of hands to help me out and I hope you can do the same. A little extra income never hurt anyone and having a backup in the event of an emergency is your first defense against losing your important client base.

Every Customer, Every Time, No Excuses

Ryan Meray — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:49:29 +0000

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.

I arrived onsite to my client’s house to look at her computer, which I had set up only six months beforehand. Like all too many of my new clients, she had acquired the computer first, then contacted me after receiving it. I could write an essay on that topic alone, but suffice to say, you have to play the hand you’re dealt. This system was in very light use for six months, and I arrive to find it throwing up “SMART STATUS FAILED” messages immediately after POST.

The system would still boot to Windows, although it would become unstable after more than a few minutes of use. I installed software that could read the SMART diagnostic codes to see what kind of damage we were looking at. Unless Speedfan recently stopped reading SMART codes under Vista, I can only assume Dell has stripped SMART reporting out of their newer Inspiron 530 models. Speedfan didn’t recognize any drives to read SMART status from, and there wasn’t any option to enable/disable SMART in the BIOS. Normally, I would’ve made a backup of the drive onsite, but it was an emergency call on short notice, and my backup tools were not on hand.

When I got the system back to the shop, I was looking forward to reading the SMART status on the drive. I know the system was in light use, and when I set it up the first time, I had sold the client a UPS with automatic voltage regulation. I knew that the system wasn’t being hit by power sags or outages, so I was shocked to find that this hard drive had over 500 reallocated sectors.

The extensive amount of drive issues meant the disk imaging software kept getting read errors. I was able to get a backup made, but not one that could be cloned back with programs and settings intact. Once the new drive was installed in the computer, I’d have to go through and reinstall all of the software and reconfigure the system just like I had the first time through. Which went faster, this time, but nonetheless, the entire experience was a huge inconvenience to the client. From the time I showed up and found the drive to be failing to the time her system was back to 100%, 6 days had passed.

So what did I do wrong? Technically nothing. I reassured her through the whole process that everything was going to be fine, and she didn’t lose any data. I handled the call to Dell to get the warranty replacement arranged, saving her the headache of trying to deal with technical support without speaking their language, and Dell had a technician onsite the next day to swap in a new drive. In the end, she was understandably annoyed by the hardware failure, but happy I was there to make it as painless as possible.

The problem is, none of this was necessary. My error was one of omission, six months ago when I first set up her computer. I installed security software and taught her how to use Firefox. I helped her pick out a good printer and set it up. I pointed out that her surge strip should be replaced by a UPS, grabbed one from my van and hooked that up as well. I even set her up with Dropbox so all her basic files would be safe.

But I didn’t bother to suggest a more comprehensive backup solution. It crossed my mind, but I probably figured, “This is a new client. I don’t want her to think I’m just here to fleece her. I’ve already sold her a printer and a UPS, I should suggest a backup solution another day.”

Wrong.

Sometimes we’re guilty of being too nice, or not wanting to seem too pushy, but these are things we have to do. It’s our job to know the risks and enumerate them to those who can’t be expected to know them. Every tech knows that hard drives can fail in six years or in six months, and though the latter is less likely, it’s still possible.

All told, there were three trips back and forth to this client’s house, adding up to at least five billable hours, plus the drivetime that I had to absorb. The total bill exceeded what it would’ve cost for a proper backup system with daily differential backups. Putting aside the fact that we’d have a point to go back to with all her programs and settings intact, there’s another bonus to a good backup software. We would’ve been made aware of the hard drive issues earlier, because the backups would’ve failed with the same errors that occurred when I tried to clone the drive. Only we’d have known before the problem was extensive, could potentially repair the damaged sectors, and get one last good clone before replacing the drive.

Never curtail your recommendations because you’re afraid of overwhelming your clients. They’ll thank you when something you did saves them, and you’ll be thankful you did everything you could to keep them running smoothly.

Interview with an Adware Author

Bryce Whitty — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 03:16:18 +0000

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

Supercomputer at Amazon

Lee — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 03:45:51 +0000

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

Prices on Mac and Windows Computers

Lee — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:58:01 +0000

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

Businesses Downgrade to XP

Lee — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:52:11 +0000

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

60% of Admins Say No to Vista

Lee — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:52:21 +0000

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