If you have been reading Technibble for any length of time, you already know what advice I have to offer a new computer business. So, for this post I would like to draw upon the experiences of the Technibble community.

What is the single, best piece of advice you could offer someone starting a new computer business?

As always, you dont need to sign up to leave a comment and you can even post anonymously if you like.
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Fabs AutoBackup is a small, portable application that allows you to pick and choose what you (or your client) want to back up with simple check boxes. The program does the rest. After the format, you can also use AutoBackup to restore all the files back to where they should be. We have actually covered Fabs AutoBackup about a year ago but it is now Windows Vista and Windows 7 Compatible and had added quite a few new features making it worth mentioning again.
For a list of what AutoBackup supports backing up and restoring, read on.
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In this article, I would like to share with you a series of business and life lessons that I have learned over the years that I believe have helped me become successful in this business.
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Linx is a small, free and portable application designed to benchmark an Intel CPU in GFlops and to test the stability of a CPU.
Linx supports both 32 and 64 bit operating systems and Single, Dual & Quad Core CPUs. While I was reviewing this application to see if its worthy of becoming the repair tool of the week, it happily maxed out all 4 cores of my QuadCore system at 100% to the point where everything loaded very slowly, but my OS remained stable.
There has even been a well known member on our forums writing a few posts (1, 2) about how this application saved him in a few hard-to-diagnose situations.

This application is a great way to really stress test a CPU so it is defnitely worth adding to your toolkit.
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If you have been following Technibble for any length of time, you will already know that I recommend that all new computer businesses should raise their prices to something more sustainable.

Once you have been in business for a year or two you may want to raise your prices again because your experience is now greater than it was when you first started.

In fact, you usually need do this because can fix problems faster. If you charge according to time, you will actually make less than when you first started because you can do it so much quicker.

Of course, raising your prices is the easy part. The hard part is convincing your clients that you are more experienced than the guy down the street who charges half what you do per hour. The client often doesn’t know any better so you need to educate them. Here are a few ways to go about it:
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There are a handful of common beginner mistakes I often see in this business. A single one of these top 7 beginner mistakes can completely cripple a new business, yet I have found businesses that are actually making a few of these mistakes at the same time. I would like to share with you the top 7 beginner mistakes I have found:
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I am sure just about everyone here knows what MSConfig is and use it often when optimising a system or removing a virus.
While working with MSConfig, we untick many of the entries that don’t need to start when the computer boots but now you are left with a bunch of unused entries. This is especially true with virus infections.

This is where MSConfig Cleanup comes in. MSConfig is a small and freeware and application that scans the startup configuration and allows you to remove any item that has previously been disabled by MSConfig.
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When you go onsite to do computer repair work, actually fixing the computer is only half of the job because also need to manage the client.
In this article I have listed a few types of clients I occasionally come across and how you can manage them.
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BlueScreenView is a small, freeware and portable application that scans all of the minidump files that are created when Windows experiences a “Blue Screen of Death”. It will display the information about all the crashes in one table with the minidump filename, the time and date of the crash, basic information about the crash (as in the BSOD message) and the driver or module that possibly caused the crash.

The main benefit of using BlueScreenView over other minidump reading applications is that it does not require the Microsoft debugging tools (which are 16 – 225mb in itself) which makes this application small, quick and portable. This tool is definitely worth having in your kit to track down the cause of BSOD’s.
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The other night just before I went to bed, I walked around the house as I always do making sure all the doors and windows are locked and my appliances are switched off. However, something slightly different happened this time because I noticed there were some cleaning cloths on one of the tables. I tried to figure out why they were there since they should be with the rest of the cleaning products. I wondered how they got there and from what I can remember they were from a big household cleanup some time ago.
I look at this table every single day and am often near it for hours since its near the TV, but I never noticed these cleaning cloths on it.

Why am I talking about cleaning cloths on a computer business site? Because your computer businesses can become like this. When things have been a certain way for so long, it becomes part of the background even though its out of place. You see it, but you don’t notice it.
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