What does a typical home or office WAN connection need in terms of bandwidth anyway? If there is a silver bullet answer for this question, I’d love to know about it. The way we consume the modern internet pipeline is vastly different from what we used to do back in the late ’90s. AOL was used by a good majority of Americans, Yahoo was still the hottest thing since sliced bread, and email was still a novel nicety, not necessarily a necessity yet.

Streaming music and video, constant social media, and Web 2.0 (er, now Web 3.0 perhaps) have transformed the web from a text driven experience to a full blown multimedia haven. Not to mention how rapidly new age cloud-based services are pushing the envelope on bandwidth needs. Google Apps, Office 365, and Salesforce are all excellent platforms – as long as you have the juice to supply them appropriately.

While the discussion doesn’t come up too often for residential customers of my company FireLogic, business offices are increasingly turning their sights onto Google Apps and Office 365 for email and collaboration platforms. But don’t count the residential user out by a long shot. They’re sucking down bandwidth quite heavily between Netflix, Pandora, and all of the online game services from PlayStation Network to Xbox Live. Estimating based on professional experience is how I handle a good portion of customers who inquire about what they need for bandwidth. But if you don’t have that background to be able to shoot from the hip with a good estimate, luckily I’ve compiled some decent sources to help out. Here are my best guidelines for recommending bandwidth needs for your customers.

Residential Customers: A Fairly Easy Crowd to Satisfy

Business bandwidth needs can get complex pretty quickly, so let’s start off with the easier clients. Residential customers have pretty straightforward needs most of the time (outside of those power users who need to stand out.) The things most residential customers care about (in general; not conclusive by any means):

• Regular internet browsing
• Social media
• Email & instant messaging
• Streaming video, music
• Online gaming (i.e. Xbox Live)
• Smartphone connectivity over Wi-Fi

The above list doesn’t represent anything too crazy, and is generally what I encounter onsite. But while bandwidth needs for a 1998-era internet were quite forgiving, today we have to account for many more variables such as:

• How much streaming video is being accessed on a daily basis?
• How many people are downloading music or streaming Pandora?
• How many simultaneous users will be on at peak hours?
• Are there multiple online gamers in the home?
• Is VOIP in the form of Vonage or similar being used?

All of these variables need to be taken into account to avoid the snags commonly experienced by an underwhelming WAN connection. While there is no great formula for determining residential WAN overhead, Ctrl-Shift.net has a pretty spot-on table showing what speed levels are accurate depending on general needs. I’ll go a step further to qualify the table and say that in general, a 2-4 person family without heavy gamers or media streamers can get away with the 3-4Mbps connection level. Add on a few more family members or heavy gamers/media types, and I’d likely look towards a 5-9Mbps or higher connection. Reference the table on their site to see where an average residence may fall depending on usage scenario.

Business Customers: Bandwidth Hungry and Tough to Predict

The types of businesses I am referring to in this quick guide are home offices, small businesses and midsize businesses. Enterprise level internet setups follow similar parameters but generally have professionals that gauge needs with a lot more accuracy. What we’re after here is more of a guiding principle for how to evaluate what an office would likely need in bandwidth. And don’t think that getting this estimation right on the first try is always a piece of cake; many times, you may have to adjust a bandwidth subscription level depending on real life usage testing.

Offices represent a different kind of beast in comparison to residential internet customers. Social media and streaming video are still bandwidth hogs, but in most cases those can and should be controlled to certain degrees. Today’s office workers are embedded heavily in some of the following internet-centric tasks:

• Email (and lots of it)
• Cloud services (hosted email, hosted accounting, hosted CRM, etc)
• Online banking
• Online research
• VOIP in place of PBX phone systems
• Downloading/uploading large files
• Online backup

While resources are still scant on how to properly estimate this with 100% accuracy, I’ve dug up a few online outlets that offer documentation. Microsoft released an overly technical brief on the matter of bandwidth estimation that is available online, but to be honest, save yourself the headache and check out a streamlined alternative that summarized the theories. Since both websites focus on email “consumption” as the basis for their calculations, I’m going to extend the scope and bring in some real world considerations:

• Is VOIP in use at the office, and how many users are on it?
• How much email is being sent & received per day per user?
• Is cloud email like Google Apps being used?
• Are other cloud services like Salesforce or Quickbooks Online used?
• What is the office culture on streaming media usage like?
• Is content filtering an option, or off the table?
• Are any public facing web servers hosted internally?
• Are social media outlets open for usage or banned?
• Does online backup (i.e. CrashPlan) play a role in core backup needs?

The above items of interest all play key roles in how much bandwidth a company may require. The recommended site I linked to provides a simple way to calculate bandwidth needs in the form of:

N x T = BN
Numbers of users (x) Traffic estimate based on usage weight = Bandwidth Needed

Some decent examples on the page above provide insight as to what they consider “light” and “medium” and “heavy” users. However, seeing as weights were considered only dependent on email needs, they are deceiving for what the modern office worker slurps from the fat pipe. I’d be as liberal to say that the following user weight groups are appropriate today:

• Light user: 50Kbps
• Medium user: 80Kbps
• Heavy user: 120 Kbps

So for example, an office may have a mixture of users. This hypothetical company is comprised of 20 users. 5 heavy users who are the big whigs, 5 medium users who are the admin assistants and related positions. The remaining 10 users are light office workers who only use email. We would setup our estimate calculation in the following manner:

• 5 (heavy users) x 120 (Kbps usage weight) = 600Kbps
• 5 (medium users) x 80 (Kbps usage weight) = 400Kbps
• 10 (light users) x 50 (Kbps usage weight) = 500Kbps
• Bandwidth Needed = 1500Kbps or 1.5Mbps

The above numbers may even be a tad conservative. So many factors could inflate bandwidth needs like the number of VOIP connections being used at a time to how many large emails are being sent and received in chunks of time. Issues with bandwidth usage spikes are frequent in office settings, where peak usage may be horrendous during mid-day hours and level off in the morning and afternoon. Real life situations vary from customer to customer so don’t hold my generalities as rule of thumb../;

You may even want to multiply my usage weights above by a degree if you feel that they are too conservative. There is no exact science to these calculations. Network baselining may provide better insight into usage but even then professional judgement is key. And for those that want a simpler way to approach estimation of bandwidth, etoolkit.org put together a simple calculator that can plug and chug variables and spit out a figure. It may not be a bad idea to average out what both listed routes above provide for estimates. Second opinions are insightful with such imperfect science.

Keep in mind that bandwidth estimation for customers is tough to perfect but becoming ever moreso necessary. The white lie of “enough bandwidth” is just that: most of the time, customers need to settle on a happy medium of cost vs needs. Your job as the technician is to properly consult them on their needs and recommend quality, cost effective solutions.

Post your tips and comments on bandwidth estimation below – we’d love to hear about them!

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit.

So what’s the big deal about 802.11ac anyway? Wasn’t 802.11n supposed to be the godsend of Wi-Fi standards, churning out solutions for all of the weaknesses of 802.11g? It almost feels like we are heading down the same “promised” path of yesteryear. With a grain of salt, I will say that 802.11ac does have potential. Here are the down and dirty basics that every computer repair tech should know.

What exactly is 802.11ac?

In plain terms, it’s no more than the technical name that will represent the 5th major revision of the standard we commonly call “Wi-Fi”. Just like Wireless N promised us faster speeds at increased distances (with real-life results not being as stellar as we hoped), 802.11ac will up the ante once again and provide some significant bumps in coverage and speed, as Qualcomm is already hyping with promises.

What benefits does it bring to the table?

A lot, actually. First and foremost, the standard (once adopted) will bring an end to the usage of the crowded and overused 2.4GHz spectrum because all new 802.11ac devices will be on the 5GHz range. The only other Wi-Fi standard that uses this same range are 802.11a devices, but those were plagued with distance problems and other compatibility issues.

The standard also promises up to 8 spatial MIMO (Multiple In – Multiple Out) streams which in plain terms determines how many paths a wireless signal has to and from the router and client device. Beamforming, as it is called, which made an appearance in some N devices will likely be standard on all 802.11ac devices. Because of the difficulty with pushing signal over the 5GHz realm, this will allow for devices to receive excellent broadcasts no matter where they may be in the coverage zone for an 802.11ac signal. And the part that most consumers will love is the speed bump up to a theoretical 1.3Gbps in the highest end devices. Faster than wired gigabit LAN, you say? Possibly!

When will 802.11ac devices become available?

The first device that represents an unfinished spec of the standard launched on May 14, 2012. Buffalo is first to market with their AirStation WZR-D1800H router and media bridge companion WLI-H4-D1300 devices. Both retail for $179.99 USD and are ready for purchase.

Be wary of recommending this to customers, as we’ve been down a similar path before when N started to show up before it was ratified by the IEEE. These first generation devices may not be entirely compatible with final 802.11ac products. I’d consider these first releases as more “technical preview” than “final product” ready for primetime.

In the end, just use best judgement with this new standard. Get familiar with the benefits that this spec brings to the table, and inform your customers appropriately. Don’t dismiss this as just another wireless war, either, as tech research firm ABI has already released a study claiming that AC will be the predominant standard by as soon as 2014. That’s effectively merely right around the corner.

G and N devices will be here to stay for the forseeable future, but just like the B devices we now rarely encounter, they will start to fade into the darkness once AC devices become commonplace. Oh and the best part about the AC standard? It will be fully backwards compatible with all prior standards. A small sigh of relief.

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit.

While I personally think the end is far from near for the Windows platform, I do believe that our industry is undergoing a wave of change that needs to be embraced. This restructuring isn’t necessarily the death of the PC, but merely the displacement of the platform as the de-facto standard for how we compute. For all intents and purposes, the PC will continue to exist, but we are making more elbow room for smartphones, tablets, and other similar “new age” devices.

As computer repair technicians, we need to be open to embracing this change no matter our beliefs on the different technologies at play. I personally am not a big fan of tablets as a whole, but this doesn’t mean that I won’t support my customers who use them. Outlets like ArsTechnica are publishing articles that claim tablets do have a place in the modern IT professional’s life, and in some respects they are correct.

Let’s put aside personal preferences for a moment and focus on something more pertinent to the bottom line of the modern computer repair shop: how can we capitalize on the tablet revolution? Being able to support and properly recommend tablets to customers is one thing. Properly positioning yourself (or your company) to profit from the tablet boom is another story. Here are my top 4 ways to harness the financial opportunity behind the craze.

4) Offer to sell tablets directly to your customers

While I personally don’t heed this advice for my own company FireLogic, I do think those that already offer a bevy of PC/Mac hardware or software sales could easily jump into this void. Teaming up with the right suppliers like Ingram Micro or ASI (for those in the States) could allow you to mark up sales by a decent 10-15% or so and bring in some nice extra income.

How viable this may be for your company is up for grabs, as the amount of time/effort that is needed for traditional hardware sales tends to be higher than some technicians want to devote to such offerings. But if you’re larger than a one or two person company, putting a part time salesperson in charge of bringing in tablet sales could be an easy money maker. Just watch the cold calls on clients – those burn more relationships than is worth.

3) Advertise custom app development services

This is another avenue for revenue that depends on your current standing and comfort with application development. Naturally, a background in computer science or related field is your best bet for jumping into this with the most success. The most competitive, but possibly also the most lucrative market, is the iOs app market which you can read up on by visiting the iOs Dev Center from Apple. The more conservative approach may be to take a peek at the Android market sphere which is supported on the Android Developers hub.

Blackberry’s PlayBook (and related BB10 OS) platforms also have their own development center which you can read up on. Keep in mind that going into the app development arena not only requires you to release a quality product, but also provide ongoing support for your software in the form of bug fixes and new releases. Good reward always comes with subsequent risk and commitment. Tread carefully with this one.

2) Team up with cloud software providers through partner programs

The market for apps and services on tablets has brought about a bevy of companies that target this new group of consumers. Just like traditional services that have been offering partner programs, these outfits are following in the same steps. One of the biggest income streams for partners in the new tablet realm happens to lie in cloud storage. Since tablets naturally rely on the cloud more heavily than local storage, numerous companies have expanded their offerings to entangle the tablet revolution.

SugarSync, for example, offers a very nice affiliate program that pays out sums directly related to the size of the plans you help sell. JustCloud has a similar program that allows you to resell their services and receive commission on your sales. And longtime cloud storage provider Box.com offers both a re-seller and referral program depending on how deep of a relationship you want to form with them. If your customers are asking for these services already, the above programs may be an easy way to profit on already established needs.

1) Offer customized training services for customers

This happens to be the most lucrative way to profit off the tablet revolution, and my favorite method as well. I will preface this particular method by saying that my company didn’t make a pre-determined choice to offer this service. We were merely thrown into the mix when customers began asking us if we can provide this. Opting to take advantage of the opportunity to train customers on tablet usage offered us a three-fold benefit.

Firstly, we make excellent profit on the training itself. Second, we are able to expand our online SEO by marketing our recorded trainings, such as this one from a local library, to new potential clientele. And lastly, word of moth referrals from these trainings are always excellent. If we don’t land another direct training gig due to referral, we generally otherwise snag a few computer repair customers nonetheless. A win-win either way you look at it.

I’m sure there are even more ways to make money off tablets than what I demonstrated above. But the aforementioned methods of revenue streams work pretty well if you dedicate the time to each chosen avenue. Tablets in general are still an up and coming sector of technology, but this doesn’t mean that you should take a backseat in the unfolding revolution. If you don’t successfully harness the needs gaps that have arisen due to tablets, your competition definitely will. And no matter what your personal opinion may be about tablets, this shouldn’t interfere with your business strategy when it comes to this hot new technology.

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit.

Screenshots:

Downloads:

Download from Official Site – 344kb

More Information

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit.

I’ve found that hunting for customers through “traditional” means isn’t always the most fruitful way to spend time and money. Google Adwords is great, but results can still be spotty and hit or miss. Local, smaller advertising opportunities tend to be fairly decent but they too have their downsides like uncertain target markets. Relying on one outlet as a means for all of your new work is prime recipe for disaster.

Turning that notion on its head, I thought about bringing my services to my customers instead of having them find me. You may not initially think of it as a gateway to new clients, but volunteer work has become a solid source of new customers for our small business. I’ve not only been able to snag excellent customers through the gift of giving away my expertise, but the relationships and partnerships I’ve built along the way have been steady referral streams as well.

How could something that is innately free and complimentary lead to such a great recurring referral network? It’s simple, actually. Think about why corporations dump thousands, if not millions, into goodwill efforts, volunteer work, and similar endeavors globally year after year. It not only provides channels of positive word of mouth to an otherwise potentially untapped market, but also raises company profile – especially when competition is fierce. Employ this same mentality for your company and you can reap the same benefits I’ve been seeing for the better part of the last year.

Here are some things to consider when deciding on what kind of volunteer work, and how much, to get involved in:

Partner with other local established outlets to give you a platform in your efforts.

People naturally place a high mental stake in businesses who are tied to trusted organizations. It’s the basis for why endorsements in the political realm are so powerful. I’ve built strong relationships with a few local libraries in my area due to the volunteer work that my company has provided for them. We started off with providing a scattering of volunteer computer classes for one library which led to us eventually providing a steady schedule of classes across multiple libraries.

Today my company is a regular staple in providing free Google Apps training and complimentary open-session tech support at these libraries. People have come to trust us not only from the content we deliver but our standing with the libraries themselves.

Fill voids or needs that your community seems to be lacking.

Doing something just for the sake of doing it will soon grow tiring, and people will see past it after a while. Keep your volunteer work fresh and look to meet the needs of your community. While we have been providing Park Ridge residents with Google Apps training for nearly a year now, we decided to branch out and offer a class based around computer and internet security.

Judging from how many malware removals we handle on a monthly basis, this was a no-brainer. The content is fresh, timely, and spot on with what we feel is a knowledge gap for the average computer user today. If you address the needs of your market through volunteer work, they are more apt to reach out to you for computer service.

Boost your company’s and your reputation by “becoming an expert”.

Fellow computer repair industry genius Brad Kendall poses the following quote on the importance of becoming an expert in your field which couldn’t be more correct:
“When you become an expert with a niche business, you can target your marketing and get more clients by focusing on the right prospects. When you are an expert, you have clients, not customers.”

Volunteer work is just the kind of outlet that you can use to not only hone your message but also to gain the trust from the audience you care about most: potential clients. Going off of my first point above, when trusted local organizations place their name behind you, they in turn reciprocate a level of notoriety for your company which would otherwise take a longer time and more varied means to establish. You don’t need to become the Kleenex of computer service to gain a strong local foothold in your area.

Don’t be afraid to advertise your core services while volunteering.

There’s a right and wrong way to subtly advertise yourself when doing volunteer work. Wearing a placard with pricing of your services while offering local computer classes is not the way to gain customers. Don’t turn your volunteer work into a bonafide infomercial. When we host Google Apps classes, we always allude to the fact that we provide training and consulting services for homes and businesses on the product. Similarly, when we help man the monthly Open Help Desk events at one local library, we appropriately offer outside services if the need arises. Don’t be overly blatant, or else people pick up on it. People are more likely to trust and use your services for paid labor if they don’t feel pressured or over-advertised to.

Consider volunteer work a lead-in for offering full featured services.

I mentioned earlier how my company offers steady Google Apps training classes on a volunteer basis at local libraries. It just so happens that our company is hosting a paid Google Apps Boot Camp series this upcoming summer which is right in line with the same content that we show off in our classes, just taken to the next level.

By providing the free training for Park Ridge residents, it gives us an outlet to offer everyone a taste of our expertise, and if they wish to utilize us more fully, they can sign up for our complete class. It works very well actually. Remember that so called “reputation chain” that I touched on earlier. That concept is fully intact with anything you happen to advertise and offer while doing your volunteer work.

Volunteer work & the positive word of mouth about it leads to excellent SEO.

My company website isn’t anything special, but its organic Google ranking in just over two years of being active is despised by other local competition. A prime example of this free word of mouth is the excellent blurb we got in a local news story about our company’s support of the yearly “Taste of Park Ridge” festival our small town hosts. Not only did that story generate more traffic for our booth at the event, but it built some nice online SEO that otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to so freely achieve.

The best part about the whole thing is how we landed the sponsorship deal. We merely exchanged computer service for a booth at the event and both parties ended up with what they wished for. We got the exposure from the event, and the Taste received excellent complimentary computer work. We have been receiving similar fanfare about our volunteer classes through newspaper articles, and the response has been phenomenal. Do good, and the positive rewards will come back to you in the end. You can read up further about my tips for improving your company website’s SEO from my previous post on Technibble.

No matter what anyone may tell you, there are no shortcuts to a rock-solid company and personal reputation for computer repair. Good hard work, an honest ethic with your customer base, and a willing extended hand of giving to your local community will ultimately lead to better word of mouth than any traditional advertising campaign. I took an entire article to dedicate to this topic because I truly believe this is an often overlooked avenue for new work, and to be completely honest: it has been working excellent for me.

Take note on my pointers above and dip your toes into volunteering your expertise. Who knows, you may actually even enjoy it (as I do).

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit.

Some Computer Technicians love Craigslist and say that they have acquired their best clients from there while others wont go anywhere near it. It definitely has a bad reputation thanks to the $5 per hour technicians that advertise there but dont let that deter you as it can definitely help your business.

In this article, I’ll show you how to form an effective Craigslist ad and keep it visible.

Money vs Effort

Before we go any further, while posting on Craigslist is free (and who doesnt like free advertising right?), it does take time. Whether it is worth it or not will depend on your situation.
If you have time but not much money, Craigslist can be a fantastic source of clients. If you stay pretty busy with your existing clients then it may not be worth it. If you are just starting your business then you definitely shouldnt pass up the opportunity to gain some initial clients.

If you live in other countries where Craigslist isnt as popular like the UK or Australia, you can substitute Craigslist.org with Gumtree.co.uk or Gumtree.com.au

Creating Your Ad

The key to creating a great ad is to make it to be able to be read quickly and be keyword rich but still human readable. You might consider something like this:

*** YourTown Computer Repair ***
Honest, Secure and Reliable
Over X Years of Experience
Reasonable Rates
Services Include: Virus Removal, Desktop & Laptops, Hardware & Software Repair, Networking
Call XXX XXX-XXXX
Your Name

This is an effective ad because it can be scanned by the reader. You need to get your point across quickly as the customer may be looking at 10 other ads and they often they will not bother to read huge blocks of text.
While this ad is very short, it says a lot more than what was actually written. Let me break it down line by line so you understand why these words were chosen allowing you to create your own ad.

• *** YouTown Computer Repair *** – When a future client is scanning a page of Craigslist advertisements but they are looking for a few keywords. They will be looking for Computer Repair services that is in their area. By having a heading like this, ticks all boxes in their mind and quickly gets their attention. Also, having a few special characters around the text seems to get more attention, but dont overdo it.
• Honest, Secure and Reliable – As most people know, there are some seriously shady people on Craigslist. These words acknowledge that there are some bad operators on Craigslist and helps set you apart that you are not one of them.
• Over X Years of Experience – This one is pretty obvious. If you have many years experience then it is worth mentioning to help separate you from the other ads. Of course, if you only have minimal experience then dont mention this line
• Reasonable Rates – You may have noticed that I havent posted the price anywhere in the ad and have only said Reasonable Rates. The reason for this is that if the customer is shopping solely on price, you will usually lose out to the $15 per hour Computer Technician. However, not everyone is shopping based on price and would rather pay a premium for someone who is good, honest and reliable. These are the clients you want. Also, by not posting your rates it requires the customer to call you and this is your chance to sell. Understand your client, sympathize with their problem and offer to make it right:
  “Your computer wont start up and you have a school project to hand in tommorow? Oh, thats not good. We can have a tech out there today and we’ll do what we can to get your machine and running as soon as possible”.

  Keep in mind that the client will also be judging you based on your phone call. You can tell a lot about someone with only 30 seconds on the phone.
  Do you answer with “X Computer Services. How may I help you?” or with a sleepy “Hello?”
  Do you sound educated or speak in slang?
  Answering the phone like a professional will help separate you from the technicians who are only doing work for pizza money.

• Services Include X, X and X – We are doing this so that people know the services that you offer, but also works as keywords for the Craigslist search feature. “Virus Removal” has been listed as the first service because most clients always think their problems are virus related, regardless of what the issue actually is.
• Your Name – Signing it off with your first name makes it seem a bit more personal and that they are not dealing with a faceless corporation

Keep Posting

Depending on your location, the Craigslist listings can move fast. You could post your ad at 9am in the morning and it could be be pushed off the bottom of the page by 10am. The way to stay at the top of the page is to post your ad multiple times throughout the day. Having said that, Craigslist frowns upon duplicate postings so in order to post your ad multiple times a day you need to change the ad slightly. You can do this by moving the lines around, maybe even test out a few completely different ads to see which one is the most effective.

If you post your ad to the Craigslist pages of large cities, your ad may drop off the page too fast. Consider posting to the Craiglist pages of the smaller surrounding towns.

If your ad is still getting pushed off the page quickly, there are more extreme methods such as posting from a handful of different Craigslist accounts with each of them posting a few times a day.

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit.

GSmartControl is capable of running the SMART Short self-test of 60 seconds and the Extended self-test which can take many hours depending on the size of the hard drive. The short diagnostic test will look for major issues but will often miss any smaller issues present. The Extended test is always recommended to test a hard drive if you have the time for it such as the machine being in your workshop.

GSmartControl runs on Windows, OSX, FreeBSD and a variety of Linux flavors including live CDs.

Screenshots:

Downloads:

Download from Official Site – 6.44mb

More Information

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit.

As trained technicians, we need to reverse the mentality behind how customers think about their data. Instead of contemplating their actions in a worst-case scenario of possible data loss, we should be preparing them for these situations with solid backup routines and proven technology. I’ve been stressing the need for good online and/or onsite backup for my FireLogic customers since my company’s inception, and you should be doing the same for your customers.

There are various trains of thought as per what a “solid” backup routine entails. Guest writer William Conner endorsed his 3-2-1 plan of data backups in an article surrounding cloud storage. He wrote, “Keep three copies, the primary data and two backups, store the backups on two different media, cloud, magnetic, optical, etc., and keep one copy offsite.”

PCMag.com had similar advice but with a few differences in approach, namely to separate your system files from your data files and to be certain to complete a full backup at least once a week to a standalone, external medium. Whichever approach you take with your customers should be suited to their needs and limitations while keeping cost concerns in mind. As the trusted repair technician, it’s ultimately up to you to make sensible recommendations.

Here are my top 3 ways to bring customers into the fold with backup routines that can save their rear ends:

• Compare the cost of routine backups vs disaster recovery.

  Numbers never lie, and customers love to see the dollars and cents behind decisions they are making. If any customer of mine balks at the cost of a routine online backup plan, comparing it to how much a single instance of disaster recovery costs is always an easy way to make logical ROI sense of the situation. I happen to partner with Seagate Data Recoveryfor time sensitive, intricate recovery needs and the starting price for even looking at data recovery runs no less than about $500 USD per incident. Tack on multiple hard drives and these numbers start multiplying easily.

  In contrast, a customer in this predicament could have opted to use an online backup service, like my favorite Crashplan, and had their entire business system backed up for around $100 USD or less per year. And not to mention the turnaround time on plan B is much faster, which means less lost business in the end as well. It’s a no-brainer. But customers don’t always think rationally like this without professional insight. If a customer still opts for the route of using a professional recovery service in case of disaster, then at least they made a conscious informed choice with the proper input. And in the event that such a situation does occur, you have full ground to refer back on in case the blame game ends up in your court.

• Defeat the nuisance factor by recommending nag-free technologies.

  The Carbonite studies referenced above made the case that many people choose not to backup because of how cumbersome and time consuming traditional backup methods are. We all get it – the path of least resistance is always the one most heavily traveled. In this case, however, we can’t let laziness win the day. There are so many great solutions to fill this void it would be a disservice as a computer repair technician to not at least be aware of their pros and cons.

  The most obvious choice these days for home and business users is still online backup from the likes of Crashplan (my favorite) or SugarSync. The nice part about all of these cloud storage systems is that they share a common nicety: ease of use and a set-it-and-forget-it approach to backups.

  Depending on the needs of your customer(s), you will have to determine which one offers the most bang for the buck and features that are necessary.For small to midsize businesses, cloud backup alone could become a strain on a limited internet connection or when the raw amount of data needing backup is larger than usual. For these situations, I’ve been recommending RAID-enabled NAS boxes for years such as the QNAP TS-259 Pro+ which can be picked up for about $500 USD (plus the cost of two hard drives of your pick).

  For half the price of a decent server, you can have a RAID enabled storage device that sits on the network and can receive backups at off-hours from all devices that need protection. The box doesn’t need routine maintenance or licensing like a traditional server and sips 1/5 the electricity of what its big brother does. In combination with a solid backup program like the freeware Cobian, a customer can backup an office full of computers without lifting a finger. It’s a solution that works well and is relatively cheap.

  These aren’t the sole alternatives out there to basic external hard drive or flash drive backups. But they do represent the easiest solutions that I’ve come across, and have successfully defeated the “but it’s too much work” argument every single time.

• At the least, get your customers using Google Drive-like products.

  Even your best argument and most cost effective solution will come face to face with die hard skeptics and change-wary customers. If they flat out refuse to adopt a proper backup routine, the least you can do is to get them onto a half-decent regiment of utilizing cloud storage apps like the newly released Google Drive or Dropbox. Google Drive is the most attractive product of the bunch thus far since it offers 5GB of storage and seamlessly integrates with many peoples’ already established Google Apps or Gmail accounts.

  As long as they remember to save their work inside of the accessible folder that is backed up by the service, they are set. Better yet, if they are avid Google Apps or Gmail users, they may even consider giving Google Docsa try – since those files will never ever touch the physical PC in the first place.I wouldn’t consider these failsafe backup routine as the notion of leftover files in other parts of the system comes into play, but in the end: it’s better than nothing, and costs $0. If their data means less to them than the effort required to log into a simple program like Google Drive, then they’ve got nothing to lose after all.

There it is. I’ve outlined 3 ways that you can get customers into a backup routine that will give them varying levels of protection and security against known hard drive failure. I’m not here to say that my methods are the best or most fool proof. What I am more concerned about is reducing the number of people who have no means of backing up their critical data. That mission starts with us, the computer repair technicians, solely and squarely. Let’s educate and inform our customers and let them make the decisions that they see fit.

If you’ve got suggestions for solutions or points you use when talking about backups with customers, please share them in the comments area below. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit.

I recently used this application when my father needed to reference an old email from 2007. We always keep backups but it was around this time he migrated from Outlook Express to Mozilla Thunderbird, so I wasn’t sure which database this email from 2007 was in. I also had backups of the backups from various periods so I had to look in many different backup versions to find it. While it isnt too hard to setup the old database in the new application, it would have been quite time consuming to search through all of the old backup versions. Mail Viewer was perfect for this situation and is definitely worth adding to your toolkit.

Mail Viewer is free for both private and commercial users.

Screenshots:

Downloads:

Download from Official Site – 1.37mb

More Information

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit.

Bypassing the Windows logon comes in handy if our clients have forgotten their logon password, their user profiles were corrupted or malware was interfering with the system before login.

This works because the user can trigger Utilman by pressing Windows Key + U before Windows logon. This will load up the Utilman.exe executable which resides in the Windows\System32 directory. If you swap the Utilman.exe file with something else like cmd.exe, you have access to the command prompt running SYSTEM privileges. SYSTEM is an account with the highest possible privileges on Windows which similar to the root account on Unix systems.

Here are the step by step instruction on how to do this.

WARNING:
You can do a lot of damage to a system if you dont know what you are doing. Technibble accepts no responsibility if something goes wrong.

First of all, we will need a way to access the file system to swap out Utilman.exe with something else like cmd.exe. There are a few ways to achieve this:

• Remove the operating system hard drive from the target system and slave it into another system with a working operating system. From there you can swap out the files on the slave drive
• Use a Boot CD like UBCD4Win and use the file management software there
• Use the Windows Vista or 7 DVD

In this example we will be using the Windows 7 DVD. To begin, boot from your Windows 7 DVD and when you reach the first screen asking about the language, currency and keyboard format, Click Next.

On the next page, down in the lower left hand side, click on the “Repair your computer” link.

Next, select the “Use recovery tools that can help fix problems starting Windows. Select an operating system to repair” option, choose an operating system from the list and Click Next.

You will now have an option to “Choose a recovery tool”. Select Command Prompt.

You should now have a Command Prompt Window open. Type in the following commands:

C:\
cd windows\system32
ren utilman.exe utilman.exe.bak
copy cmd.exe utilman.exe

This will navigate to the system32 directory, rename utilman.exe to utilman.exe.bak, make a copy of cmd.exe and name it utilman.exe.

Remove the DVD and reboot the system.

Once the computer boots up normally, press the key combination Windows Key + U and you should get a Command Prompt. If the Command Prompt doesnt appear, press Alt+Tab as the Command Prompt may appear behind the Logon screen. From here, you can run many (if not all) of the commands you can normally use in Command Prompt.

Resetting an Existing Users Password

WARNING:
If you reset a users account password. This will permanently lose access to the users encrypted files. Be sure to back these up.

To reset an existing users password, we need type the text below. In this example, we will be changing JohnDoe’s password to “hunter2″.
net user JohnDoe hunter2

You should be able to log in with this new password straight away.

If you dont know what the username on the system actually is, you can see a list of the users by typing:
net user

Creating a New User Account

To create a new user account in the Command Prompt (Username: NewGuy. Password: abc123), and add them to the Administrators usergroup type:
net user NewGuy abc123 /add
net localgroup Administrators NewGuy /add

Again, you should be able to login straight away with this new account.

Reverting Changes

To restore utilman.exe, in the Command Prompt type in:
C:
cd windows\system32
del utilman.exe
ren utilman.exe.bak utilman.exe
Then reboot the system.

To remove the new user account you just created earlier, type in:
net user NewGuy /delete

That’s all there is to it.

Thanks to MobileTechie for mentioning this trick.

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit.