When you are first starting your business, one of the last things you will probably be thinking about is how you are going to exit your business.
However, this something that needs to be considered early on in your businesses life. Do you plan to sell the business and retire at 60 so you can live out the rest of your days playing golf? or do you plan to build the business up over the next few years and sell it for a healthy profit?
Whatever you do, you need to plan your exit strategy now because what you do in the present can greatly increase the value of your business in the future.
So, what can you do now to increase the value of your business?
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The title pretty much says it all. This .BAT file will kill all currently running apps on a system that the user started with the exception of a few locked Windows processes and some antivirus products. This comes in handy when you are working on a system that has too many processes running and thus slowing it down; often to the point where its difficult to do any work on it.

Being a BAT file, this script is obviously highly customizable. It works on a “if the process is not in this list, then kill it” system; so you can add processes to the list that you do not to be killed such as the menu for your USB drive applications or Firefox.

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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.

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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Damaged docx2txt is a freeware recovery tool designed to recover text from corrupt Word 2007 XLSX files. Word 2007 files are actually a collection of zipped XML files and the XML format is somewhat unforgiving of data corruption. This application unzips the partially corrupted XML files and tries to read what it can, not caring about malformed XML. This tool pretty much just dumps the text it finds in the XML file to text.

Corrupt Excel xlsx2csv is similar to the above except it is designed to recover the content of corrupt Excel XLSX files. Again, XSLX files are based on XML files which is unforgiving to data corruption. This application has the ability to maintain the cell formatting and the cells content; including seperate workbooks in a single XLSX file. You can copy and paste the content out of the application or export the entire spreadsheet to CSV.

Both of these applications were originally Perl scripts but have since had a GUI made for them (you will see a command window though). These applications are “mostly portable” as it doesnt need to be installed but requires .NET version 2.
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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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