Whether we are cognisant of the fact or not, as humans we go through life building connections and relationships which fill different needs. A majority of these happen to be family ties and friendships with people we form bonds with, whilesome of these are just brought about by happenstance. Another sizable portion of these connections tend to be formed around networking; finding people with similar or common interests for the sake of expanding our knowledge base. The computer repair field brings about no lesser of a necessity to reach out and cull information from informal relationships we build over time.

Personal Learning Networks are more commonly (and formally) referred to in the realm of education. Teachers and instructors have been blogging for years about how to expand their own networking circles through these “ingenious” concoctions known as PLNs, but the concept as a whole is nothing that revolutionary.

A PLN (Personal Learning Network) is a collection of anything you want it to be, really. In the most formal sense, you structure a PLN to build ties with outlets or individuals that can provide information & insight for topics you want to learn more about. Computer repair technicians may go about this in one form or another, but likely have never thought of their outreach as being the framework for a PLN.

In my own adventure to become a better technician and ultimately to make my company FireLogic as great as it can be, I’ve been reaching out to various people and online venues to solidify myself in the computer repair field. Blogs, podcasts, websites, email listserves, social networking circles, newsletters, and much more. A PLN to me may be entirely different for what a PLN may mean to you. Whatever the case, take a moment to evaluate how and where you reach out for assistance. With a few pointers, you could cut your hunt for information down by half or more.

Here’s my best advice when it comes to building your own computer repair PLN:

Farbar Service Scanner is a small, portable and free application that gives a detailed report on the files, registries and services that are responsible for network connectivity. The purpose of this report is to help you identify the source of connectivity problems if one of these files is infected or corrupted. This is especially useful after you have removed Malware from the operating system system but it is still unable to connect to the internet.

Customers … love them. Can’t get enough of them in fact (obviously). However, I have on a more regular basis, lifted my phone and inspected the caller display with some amount of concern, or dare I say dread? Lately it’s given me the gut feeling of knowing that this caller will probably not amount to much, other than perhaps wasting another five minutes of my day; notice the emphasis on another. In the interests of privacy (I would also like to keep this customer) I shall refer to him as Client A from here on out.

Many computer repair technicians fall into the same boat: they run a small business from their home office and primarily provide onsite service. When I used to be the sole person servicing customers, life was easy and a single phone number without any fancy features was more than ample.

However, adding workers behind your name and expanding a mobile workforce can be difficult without some sort of centralized phone system to handle call routing. The question remained: how do I take advantage of features that only in-house complex phone systems generally provide? I had a shoestring budget, didn’t want to install any complex hardware, and I had a soft-spot for cloud software. To my surprise, Google Voice saved the day.

MailStore Home is a small, portable and freeware utility designed to make archiving, backing up and migrating emails easy. MailStore supports many different types of mailboxes such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Exchange Server, Office 365, .EML files and more. It also supports a variety of internet based mailboxes such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail.

Once the email has been backed up, MailStore allows you to search in all of the email accounts from a central location within seconds. It allows you to restore the emails back to an email client with one click and migrate emails from one type of mailbox (ie. Gmail) to another type of mailbox (ie. Outlook).

If your personal life or business relies on cloud based email like Gmail, it is important to have an offsite backup since you never know when Google will suspend the account, have an extended outage or have your account hijacked by a hacker.

The computer repair field is filled with a dynamic variety of personalities, all with their own particular skills & traits. However, something must be said for a technician that performs all of his hardware repairs by way of guidance to his wife. I had the opportunity to sit down with the truly inspirational Kevin Berg, owner of CompuPane LLC based in Auburn, Washington (USA). Kevin’s story is one of perseverance, dedication, and a natural love of computers – in light of being diagnosed with the physically debilitating condition cerebral palsy as a child.

It’s almost a guaranteed fact, at some point this will happen to every one of us within our small business careers and first time round will likely result in some stress and the odd sleepless night, I am of course referring to late or non-payment! I’m more than thankful that I rarely encounter a difficult client when it comes to payment; in fact it seems to me that most of my residential clients understand that paying on the day is ideal for all parties. I’ve never needed to ask it just seemed to work out, from day one whether it be cash, cheque or PayPal I always received due payment on the day of any repair or returned computer. But then as the old saying goes “There’s always one!”

A quick jump around the Technibble forums and it won’t be long before you run into topics covering all manner of customer difficulties whether it be late payments, payment refusal or customers delaying payment through excuse of the “dog ate my wallet” variety. These problems of course occur with both residential and business customers alike for various reasons so having some form of deterrent in the form of a Late Fee may be the way to go? Perhaps, but there’s plenty to consider before you start adding charges to your next invoice.

Eraser is a data wiping tool that securely and permanently deletes files through a multi-step process. In addition to removing files from data tables within your operating system, Eraser will write over your deleted files with special patterns designed to completely and permanently obliterate anything you delete. Eraser even features scheduling functionality that allows you to specify when certain folders or files should be securely deleted.

The latest rumors are pitting Windows 8 at an October 2012 release date. Are you ready? It feels as if Windows 7 just came out, and to most large companies, they are just rolling out the operating system. However, whether we like it or not, computer technicians not only need to be aware of the arrival of Windows 8, but should have a sense of what changes this new platform will bring. Windows 7 has already proven to be the fastest selling OS of all time, and Windows 8 will likely be no different. Your customers may even have their hands on retail Windows 8 systems before you get a chance to.

It’s probably a given that we are all very tech savvy individuals with home networks that extend past the functionality and complexity of the average home, for the very simple reason that we love technology and that we love what we do. Sooner or later we reach a critical point where we start to spend an extensive amount of time managing our own networks which often relates to file management, backups, remote file access and a lot of time supporting our own family members.

Introducing your own business start-up into your home network further compounds the problem by increasing your storage needs and highlights the importance of keeping critical business files safe. Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS from here on out) is a powerful, cheap and an easy to use solution to help you take back control and focus your time where its needed most.