Laptop repair can be tricky. There are hidden screws all over the place, a certain order you have to pull it apart and sometimes the spare parts are hard to find. Laptops are also prone to damage that a desktop wouldnt normally have such as being dropped or having a damaged DC jack.

Steve Cherubino, who was computer technician until he went full time podcasting has worked on thousands of laptop computers in his shop and would now like to share his laptop repair knowledge with you in the form of high definition, narrated, downloadable videos.
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There are two pieces of advice that are often mentioned here on Technibble. They are:

1. It is a good idea to get experience while working from someone else before you start your business.

2. It is a good idea to build up your client base after hours, until it reaches a point where your day job is affecting your computer repair business. That way, it’s a soft slide into the shallow end rather than a jump into the deep end.

Stand alone, each of these lines are good advice. However, they not good advice if you were to do both of these at the same time. Let me explain.
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XPQuickFix is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to quickly fix any restrictions and other errors that are often caused by viruses. XPQuickFix can correct 25 common Windows XP problems such as enable the Task Manager, enable Registry Editor, fix a CD autoplay and more.
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You may have just started your business and have properly registered it with your accountant. You put your repair kit together, placed some ads in the paper, handed out some flyer’s around town and are now awaiting some phone calls. There is only one problem, the phone isn’t ringing. It seems your advertising isnt working and here are some factors that can cause your advertising to fail and how to fix them.
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AppRemover is a small, free and portable utility designed to be a single removal tool for a huge list of security products. It can remove products made by Avast!, AVG, Avira, BullGuard, CA, ClamWin, ESET, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Lavasoft, McAfee, Microsoft, Norman, Panda, Sophos, Symantec, TrendMicro, TrustPort, Webroot and many more.
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Most computer technicians living in a decent sized city have big box computer store of some kind near them. The definition of a “big box computer store” is a company that sells computers and has many large stores across the country. Many stores like this that often stock computers with decent specifications for as low as $400. To make matters worse, some of these stores that used to only sell computers have now expanded into fixing them as well.

So, how can you compete with the big box stores?
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Zone Alarm is a well known internet security package and most of the time it works fairly well. However, because this application has to sink its hooks deep into a Windows to protect the operating system, it can cause serious problems when the application does not uninstall correctly.
It seems, based off Zone Alarms official forums that there are a lot of people having trouble removing Zone Alarm and this is where the Zone Alarm Removal Tool comes in. Its a small, portable and freeware and its probably a good idea to have on your USB drive since you probably wont be able to connect to the internet to download it if you encounter these problems with Zone Alarm.
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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.

Many technicians that are just starting out would love to accept credit cards, but the idea of accepting them right from the start is daunting. While starting up my personal business, I ended up deciding to take credit cards right from the start, but I learned a lot along the way.
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Clonezilla is a free, open source disk imaging tool that is loaded with features. While it is a little rough around the edges visually, it is very capable. It supports over a half dozen file systems covering Windows, Linux and Macintosh based computers. If Clonezilla does not support the file system, you can still image the hard drive by doing a sector-by-sector copy.
Clonezilla can be run from a Live CD, USB drives or a network drive and has the ability to either create a single image file, or do a direct copy from one hard drive to another.
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Since I have started my computer business I have learned a lot. I have learned not only lessons that apply to the computer business, but lessons that also apply to any industry or even just life in general.

One of the lessons I would like to share with you is that by giving something away or spending more money can actually save or make you a lot more money.
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