The following is a paid review. However, it completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid.

The folks over at HandyRecovery.com sent me a copy of their software “Handy Recovery 4.0″ to play with and review.
I will begin by talking about what it is. Handy Recovery is data recovery software designed to restore files that have been accidentally deleted or where damaged by virus attacks, software faults or from deleted/formatted partitions.

It works under 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista (has earned the certified for Vista logo). It supports all Windows file systems and hard/floppy drives and unlike much of the recovery software out there, it can recover from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Multimedia and SD Cards. It can also recover from compressed and encrypted files on NTFS drives.

Now, onto my review of the software.
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There have been a few times where I have been called out to onsite repair jobs that only took 10 minutes to complete. However, I need to charge a minimum of 30 minutes to 1 hour (depending on distance) to cover the driving time and cost. Now if I were the client and I was slugged the full hour fee for a 10 minute job, I would feel like I didn’t get my moneys worth.

So how do we make our clients feel like they got their moneys worth? Always provide value.
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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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SysInspector is a standalone, portable utiltity designed to show you information about your computer with a emphasis on finding viruses and malware. Like many other system information tools, SysInspector will show you your running processes, network connections, running services and specifications.
However, what makes SysInspector different is that it has a slider which filters the risk level. On the lowest setting it’ll show you everything (for example, known good processes), but as you slide it to higher risk levels it only shows you items that it finds highly suspicious.
The lowest level shows everything, the middle levels show only third party objects and other items that dont come with Windows. The highest level shows items that could be potentially dangerous such as unknown items that are set to start during bootup, and other unknown items in strange areas.

This is a great tool to help you spot viruses, malware and other nasties on a system.
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Just about everyone in the western world knows of the brand “McDonalds” - the largest fast food chain in the world serving 54 million customers daily. Here are 5 business tips that we can all learn from McDonalds.
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A few months ago I discovered a way to easily add hundreds of new people to your potential client base with little effort.
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Explore2fs is a tool for accessing Linux’s ext2 and ext3 filesystems under Windows in a Windows Explorer like interface. This application can run on all versions of Windows and is able to read Linux virtual volumes. This is a handy tool to have if you work with Linux.
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In the past, I have mentioned many of the mistakes I had made as a Computer Technician, mainly to show beginner technicians that it can happen to any of us and so they can avoid my mistakes.

The point of this article is to get some reader discussion going so we can all learn from eachother. So the question is:

What Was The Biggest Mistake You Made As a Computer Technician?

As always, comments are open and you dont need to sign up to post a comment. You can even post annoymously if you wish. Just click the comment link below this post.

Technibble’s articles mainly focus on starting a computer business, but something else that is just as important as opening a business is closing one. Its hard to determine when it is time to close your doors. Am I giving up too easily? Am I just in a slow patch right now? Here are 4 great indicators that it is time to close down.
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Ok, this one isnt exactly a repair tool, but it is very useful to have this in your kit. As some of you may already know, the new Microsoft Office 2007 no longer uses the .doc format for documents. By default, it now uses a new extention called .docx.

Saving in the new format isnt a problem if you actually have Office 2007, but when people using older copies of Office try and open a .docx file, they cant. The Office 2007 compatibility pack allows those with older versions to open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.
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