Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

Only 2 Days Left on Final Maintenance Checkup Sale of 2008

Thor — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:02:56 +0000

Only 2 days remain to get Schrock Innovations' Preventative Maintenance Checkup on sale for only $19.99! This is the FINAL maintenance checkup sale of 2009, so it you miss this one its a long wait until 2010! We are “officially” launched the sale on last weekend’s Compute This radio show, and our staff has done an amazing job keeping up with the workload. Unlike the previous sale, our turn around times are very reasonable (3 days or less). A PC Maintenance Checkup is a complete head-to-toe examination of a computer that takes between 8 and 12 hours of bench time to complete. Our Maintenance Checkup is normally a great deal at its usual price of $60, but for next week only we will be discounting that price to an amazing $19.99.

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Small Business Recession Growth Strategy in Practice

Thor — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:39:55 +0000

A recession is a massive opportunity for a small business that is willing to take a few calculated risks for a big reward. While your competitors are petrified by fear - real or manufactured - about what the future holds, your business needs to seize the present. By moving aggressively with calculated marketing moves you can snatch customers and marketshare for your company while your competitors' fears become their reality. Over the past few months I have written about: * Yellow Page Advertising Strategies for a Start-up Business * Radio Advertising Strategies that Work Fast * Why a Recession is the Best Time to Lead Your Industry * How to Use Dunn & Bradstreet to Identify & Target Weak Competitors I know these strategies work because I employ them in my computer repair company, Schrock Innovations. Schrock was started in 1999 and controls a commanding share of the Lincoln and Omaha computer repair marketplace. We have zero debt, great cash flow, and we are taking in an average of 162 new customers each and every month in 2009. We are GROWING in a recession.

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Best Buy and Sprint Seeking Netbook Suckers

Thor — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:06:04 +0000

Remember the gold old days when you could get a free computer as long as you agreed to pay a monthly dial-up provider like AOL $30 a month for slow, overpriced Internet access? Well grab your credit cards and put on your bifocals! The deal has returned courtesy of Best Buy and Sprint, but this time the screen is a bit smaller. ZDNet is reporting that the two companies are partnering to offer a Compaq-branded HP Mini 110c netbook for only 99 cents when you sign a two-year 3G Internet contract. These free computer offers are REALLY tempting because consumers in a recession-battered economy get what they want right now - a new computer - by signing a promise to give more money later. Breaking Down the Numbers Under this deal, you get the $389 retail value netbook for only $.99. The contract costs about $60 a month, so if you multiply that by 24 months, you would find that the contract will cost you $1,441 over its two year term. Obviously the Sprint 3G connection is portable, so you are paying a price premium on your Internet connection to be able to take it with you anywhere you go. Additionally, there are limits to how much Internet connectivity you can use before additional charges get lumped in. For the sake of comparison, the cost for you to buy this netbook and use it on a budget cable modem or DSL connection would be much, much less expensive. Try $20 a month for the DSL Internet connection and $389 for the netbook. The total cost over 2 years is only $869 - a savings of $572 over two years (nearly $24 a month).

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Schrock Web Division Growth Required Hosting Move to Rackspace

Thor — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:44:04 +0000

Schrock Innovations' web development division started off in 2001 with just one website - its own. We hooked up with a company in Lincoln called Binary.net that handled hosting for all of the websites we would come to manage flawlessly. Schrock is a high-service providing company and our web customers expect us to be there when they need us in the capacity that they need us. Schrock Moves Hosting to Rackspace To help meet that service expectation, we decided the time to move our hosting infrastructure to another company had arrived. We moved all of our serveres to Rackspace Hosting about 4 months ago, and we haven't looked back since. Rackspace was voted one of the best Fortune 500 companies to work for in 2008, and I can honestly say I have never had a bad experience dealing with them over the phone or email.

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Golf for the Troops Next Weekend at Wilderness Ridge Golf Club

Thor — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:00:31 +0000

Schrock Innovations might be closed today, but we are celebrating Independence Day by supporting a fund raiser for children our US service men and women. The "Golf for the Troops" charity golf tournament is in its third year and has raised more than $25,000 locally in Lincoln to fund scholarships for our troops' children. Schrock will be contributing a gift card to the list of prizes available to those who participate in the tournament. My wife was an Air Force Brat, so I have an understanding for some of the stresses that military families go through between multiple moves, long deployments, and time lost. Our armed forces take on these stresses in a selfless desire to serve, and this event shows our local military members that Lincoln cares about their sacrifice and appreciates it. The tournament consists of two 18-hole rounds of golf, a silent auction, couple of meals and many prizes. The tournament is scheduled for July 9th at the Wildreness Ridge Golf Course. Contact the golf course for information on how you can enter and be a part of a great cause. Have a safe and fun July 4th weekend, and thank you to all of the men and women who have served over the years to keep the US a free and safe place for everyone.

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Windows 7 Makes Solid State Drives Worth the Money

Thor — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:22:45 +0000

I have been playing around with a solid state hard drive for the past few weeks to get a better understanding of how they improve my notebook's performance under different operating systems. While I certainly don't look like Goldilocks, my solid state drive experience was a lot like the classic children's fairytale. Windows XP on a solid state drive was fast, but at times too fast. With XP, my notebook booted so fast that I could log in, and open Firefox just to have it fail because the system had not negotiated an IP address yet. Windows Vista was not much faster than a traditional hard drive. I got a serious case of heartburn thinking I had just spent $450 on a 120 GB solid state drive when a $60 drive would have done the same job. Then there was Windows 7. It booted in seconds. Response times were amazing. Windows 7 was JUUUUST RIIIIIGHT! Why is Windows 7 So Fast on a Solid State Drive? Flash drives became fashionable when Windows XP as around, but only as a backup medium or for temporary storage. Nine years later, a bundle of super speedy flash drives can be teamed up to create an entire hard drive with no moving parts. Lower failure rates, faster access times and no defragging. It sounds like a match made in heaven, except that XP and Vista were hard-coded to treat all drives like they spin. That means that unnecessary operations happen all the time on a solid state drive that tie up valuable resources and sap the power of this expensive performance booster. That is, all operating systems except Windows 7. Windows 7 is the first Microsoft operating system that was specifically designed to detect if it is operating on a solid state drive or a rotating disk drive. Windows 7's secret is a technology Microsoft calls TRIM. TRIM allows Windows 7 to detect * Enhancing device wear leveling by eliminating merge operation for all deleted data blocks * Making early garbage collection possible for fast write * Keeping device’s unused storage area as much as possible; more room for device wear leveling.

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Alarm Equipment Inc Moves Website to Schrock Innovations

Thor — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:17:10 +0000

Alarm Equipment Inc. (AEI) in Omaha, NE came to Schrock Innovations for a website "freshening" a few months ago. AEI's website was not ranking in Google for the key search terms they needed to bring in new alarm business. Today more people use Google than the Yellow Pages so ranking when it counts can be vital to a business' success! AEI Asked Schrock Innovations to modify their existing website to modernize its look and improve its SEO performance without changing the basic layout and styling of the existing website.

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Get Windows 7 Now While Supplies Last at Schrock Innovations

Thor — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:40:50 +0000

Microsoft is making Windows 7 available for pre-order now through July 10, 2009! Order your copy of Windows 7 and installation from Schrock Innovations and save 58% off of the software's regular purchase price! Windows 7 Installed for Only $219.99!?! If you have ever purchased an operating system upgrade, you know that they normally cost hundreds of dollars and can take a degree in computer science to install successfully. Between drivers, updates, and lost files upgrading your operating system can be a real challenge - Unless you let Schrock's award-winning technicians do it for you!

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Is Your Computer Ready for Windows 7?

Thor — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 03:35:14 +0000

Microsoft announced a special Windows 7 pre-order program today that offers the company's newest operating system at a DEEPLY discounted price. But is your computer ready for Windows 7? There are two basic camps of people who will be upgrading to Windows 7 - Vista users and XP users (Windows 2000 users can also technically upgrade, but in many cases their hardware is so old that ot will be incompatible). Testing Windows Vista PCs for an Upgrade to Windows 7 Vista users will have a pretty easy time upgrading to Windows 7. Microsoft is promising that everything that works with Vista will work with Windows 7. When you run the upgrade disk, Windows 7 moves all of your documents, settings, registry, and programs to a holding directory. It then installs a clean copy of Windows 7 and copies all of your information back over. This eliminates many of the layered operating system problems that plagued XP and older upgrades. In theory, everything should just work after the installation, but if you want that extra measure of comfort, you can run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor to check for any issues. Testing Windows XP PCs for an Upgrade to Windows 7 Windows XP users will have a bit of a tougher time upgrading. It is HIGHLY recommended that you ru the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. There is a good chance that some of your hardware and/or software will not be compatible with Windows 7. As a rule of thumb, if your software is not compatible with Vista, it will not be compatible with Windows 7. With that said, the business and Ultimate versions of Windows 7 have a special feature that allows you to download and run a virtualized copy of Windows XP from within Windows 7. Think of it like running Windows XP as if it was a program, and then opening up other programs from within it. This will allow business users who rely on older software (and lazier IT staffs) to still run many of their old XP programs in a limited form. There is no additional charge for the virtualized XP download.

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Free Business Leads From Google Local Business Center

Thor — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:00:35 +0000

When new web clients come to me they all seem to want one thing – They want to rank well in Google to get FREE business leads. Before you start to navigate the thorny paths of search engine optimization, take advantage of what Google gives you for FREE. Take 5 minutes to list your business with [...]

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