Guest Post by Justin. Justin is a small business owner and computer technician with Protocol16, supporting small and mid-sized businesses as well as consumers in the metro area of Portland, Oregon.

It’s not secret that business customers bring in more money than residential. But, in order to win over some businesses, you need to be familiar with some of the operating systems they use. For larger shops and those with Enterprise level experience, this is second nature. For those stating out, however, it can be something that scares even the most seasoned small-time business owner.
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I recently received an email from a company called M80 that is working with Microsoft to help promote Windows 7. The email said:

“They’ve [Microsoft] created a new site to support Windows 7 and are offering IT professionals a candid look into the product decisions they’ve made, as well as genuine insight from the engineers themselves. The site will serve as an entirely new forum for Microsoft to interact with the community and actively join the conversation surrounding Windows 7. They’re looking to hear any opinions, answer any questions, and get some real insight from their users on how to make Windows 7 as good as possible. “

At the moment, the website is mostly being used as an advertising tool for Windows 7 where IT Professionals and Microsoft developers talk about how great Windows 7 is. Personally, I am not interested in seeing the commercials but what I am interested in is giving Technicians like ourselves who have seen the worst of Windows, the ability to give the Microsoft developers some feedback on Windows 7 and help make it a better product.
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If you spend any decent amount of time working on clients machines (especially residential ones), it wont take you long until you encounter a computer with pirate software on it. This can sometimes be just a few applications like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop; or the whole operating system itself.

The question was raised in the Technibble forums about how should we deal with computers that have pirate software on them and there were many different answers. Some said they will flat out refuse to work on a computer that has pirate software on it. Others said its none of our business what a client does with their own machine and will work on it anyway.

Some said they will tell the client that they have pirated software to make them aware of it, but not lecture. Others will recommend freeware alternatives in their place.

Another issue is, what if your competitor is installing pirate copies of Windows on the computers he is selling? Should you report them since they have the price advantage and leave yourself open to revenge tactics? or just let them kill themselves off as more customers find out their copies of Windows are pirate and cannot use them once Windows Genuine Advantage is installed?

What would you do? Would you flat out refuse to work on the machine? Turn a blind eye? Tell them and work on it anyway? Is it our responsibility to tell the client?

How would you deal with a competitor who was selling computers with pirated copies of Windows? Drop us a comment.

In a recent article I talked about the essential skills needed for basic residential computer repair work and one of the skills I mentioned was understanding Windows Licensing.

I touched on the topic a little bit in an old article about how to determine what type of license key/cd you have but didn’t go into it very deeply. In this article, I will tell you the differences between each Windows XP license in greater detail.
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In one of my video podcasts, I showed the viewers how to remove a virus without the use of a virus scanner.
To demonstrate this, I obviously didn’t want to infect my own computer. While I could have used a test computer as a sacrificial goat but I don’t want to have to install XP every time I want to test something. So, I used something called a “Virtual Machine”.

In this article, I’ll show you an easy way to create your own virtual machine.
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For the last few weeks I have been posting the tools in my arsenal and there is another one I would like to mention. Its a book called Upgrading and Repairing PCs by Scott Meuller. The book is the reference guide for computer technicians that covers the fine details of the inner workings of a computer. I think that Steve from the Podnutz podcast put it best: “[the] book almost removes a reason to Google”.

I currently own an older edition and still refer to it regularly. The editions are updated every couple of years and the most recent edition has added the following:

• Deep coverage of the new Core 2 (8th gen or “886″) processors, featuring the new “Core Microarchitecture”
• Cutting edge coverage of quad-core desktop (Kentsfield) processor versions
• Detailed coverage of AMD’s Socket AM2 processors
• Coverage of evolutionary changes in chipsets, including new versions of Intel’s 9xx series chipsets and new 3x series Intel chipsets; coverage of new chipsets from Nvidia, VIA, and SiS has also been added
• Coverage of the new DTX and Mini-DTX motherboard form factors from the newly formed alliance between AMD and ATI
• Beefed-up coverage of Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives/players
• Extensive coverage of new GPUs in addition to heavy-duty coverage of SLI and Crossfire
• Building a PC from scratch–from assembling the hardware to BIOS setup and installing Microsoft Windows XP or Vista

If you are a computer technician you need this book. You can get it over at Amazon for $37.79.

Most techs with a few years of experience under their belt have probably come across the Windows XP corrupted registry hive problem at some point in their career. When it happens, Windows wont start and will present one of these messages:

• Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM
• Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE
• Stop: c0000218 {Registry File Failure} The registry cannot load the hive (file): \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE or its log or alternate

In most cases, Safe mode wont work either. The uniform approach to fixing this is by getting into the Windows XP repair console and manually replacing the file with the copy that was created when the system was first installed. However, any software or drivers (depending on whether it was SOFTWARE or SYSTEM that failed) that was installed after that point may not work since the registries for them hadnt been installed back then.

Here is my method that I have been using to fix this. It reverts the registry to only a few days earlier rather than back to when Windows was first installed.
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As most computer technicians should know by now, Windows XP Service Pack 3 has been available via Windows update since the 6th of may so enough time has passed for people to install it and some problems to arise. This article contains information that all computer technicians should know about Windows XP Service Pack 3 including what SP3 fixes, whats new, important information and some known problems and solutions.
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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.
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Microsoft Windows hasn’t natively used DOS since the days of Windows98. However, for a computer technician DOS commands are still very useful even in the XP and Vista environment.

For many techies this stuff is old hat and is mainly for the younger generation, however the old hats may see some commands that they didn’t know about. By no means is this exhaustive list of DOS commands are there are thousands more (Google them if you need them). This list has commands that are particularly useful to technicians repairing computers.
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