Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

A few weeks ago I posted about a special offer we put together to help get Vista’s Service Pack 2 safely installed on computers before it is force-fed to our customers via automatic update on June 30th. The response was pretty good, and we were turning around most of the installs (even the problem children) in less than a day.

We cut a new commercial that is running on local Lincoln television to promote the offer as well. Take a look:

Netbooks are the latest arrival on the computing scene and are rapidly gaining popularity and acceptance among serious computer users. In fact, there are reports that even Apple who one said netbooks were “junky” is bowing to the pressure to enter the netbook game.

What is a Netbook?

Basically, netbooks are miniature laptop computers. They have screens that range from 7.5 to 10 inches, small keyboards, wireless capability, and often don’t come with CD drives.

Netbooks are designed to be small, light and run a LONG time on a small battery. For example, Schrock Innovations carries the Asus netbook line in our Computer Service Center. These netbooks weigh in at less than 2 pounds, last 5-6 hours on a single battery charge, and have enough power to run Windows XP or Windows 7 comfortably.

Before you get blind sided by a huge automatic update next week, you should know that Microsoft’s latest major update will not install on your computer without some additional preparation.

This morning Microsoft released Vista Service Pack 2 for manual download. It should start automatically downloading to your PC within the next 10 days. You need to prepare your computer for this BEFORE it happens.

If you do not do these things, your computer will not be able to successfully install Vista Service Pack 2.

BEFORE you allow Service Pack 2 to install you must do the following:

* Install Windows Vista Service Pack 1. You can’t install Service Pack 2 without first installing SP1. If you try, the installation will fail and could damage your Windows Vista installation.
* Install the Microsoft Servicing Stack Update. This is the most complicated Service Pack that Microsoft has ever released. For it to even install properly a patch has to be downloaded and installed first!
* Backup your data. If something goes wrong during the installation process, you don’t want to lose everything.

I know some people reading this just said virtu-what? In English, Microsoft has announced that in Windows 7 you will actually be able to run Windows XP as a program – just like you would run Internet Explorer or Microsoft Word.

The Windows XP Virtualization will be available in Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate only – lower versions will not support the feature.

This is not unlike the upgrade program that was offered by many PC manufacturers to avoid the problem that always plagued OEM’s just before the release of Windows Vista. People tend to wait for the new OS rather than continuing to buy PCs as they normally would. The end result is an unnaturally slow quarter for manufacturers followed by a massive next quarter. The upgrade offer tends to smooth things out a bit.

It is important to note that manufacturers may choose to extend this offer back even further at their own expense to include users who purchased computers before July 1.

If you are trying to squeeze every ounce of speed from your Vista computer while you wait for Windows 7, there are a few tweaks you can use to get things moving a little more quickly.

Microsoft put a lot of thought and effort into reducing time required to boot Windows Vista by reworking its boot sequence. The result is an operating system that gets you to your desktop faster than ever so you can start working within seconds – not minutes – of pressing your power button.

Even though Vista is designed to boot faster than Windows XP, many of the same XP tweaks can be used to shave precious seconds off of Vista’s startup time while adding a little zip to its day-to day performance.

At this very moment the latest spyware threat may be silently slicing through your computer’s anti-virus defenses, infecting your PC with pop-up ads or monitoring programs designed to steal your passwords and other sensitive information.

With thousands of spyware threats on the web, it is important that you know how to detect and remove these pests from your PC. Over the past few years spyware removal has gone from a technical nightmare to a simple, automated process thanks to the multitude of anti-spyware security applications in the marketplace today.

But before you decide to purchase an off-the-shelf product to secure your PC, you might be surprised to know that there are some free, easy-to-use programs available on the Internet that will remove these pests from your computer.

While there are many programs available to remove spyware with ease, there are two applications in particular that stand out in the crowd as safe, secure programs to clean any hidden spyware from your PC.

Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware (www.lavasoft.com) and Spybot Search and Destroy (www.spybot.info) are both excellent, free applications for removing spyware from your PC. While each application accomplishes similar goals, they are slightly different in how they update, scan for threats, and remove them. This article will show you step-by-step how to install each application and use it to remove any spyware that may be sneaking around on your hard drive.

The difference between computing bliss and a blue-screen tragedy can be as simple as a bad driver, a new piece of hardware, or the latest software update.

Windows users fall victim to any number of blue screen error messages that can transform a once powerful computer into a helpless doorstop. Fortunately, many of the most common hardware errors can be diagnosed and resolved with little more than a quick web search and some troubleshooting skills.

In this post, we will address some of the most common Windows blue screen errors, tell you what causes them and how you can resolve them yourself.

Schrock Innovations Web Development Team has been busy the past few days testing our clients’ website to make certain they will display properly in IE8. In the coming weeks, IE 8 will be pushed to every Windows XP and Vista user through Windows Update.

If your webs-ite is not compliant, it could look awful in the new browser, and your company’s image could be slighted in the eyes of millions of web surfers world-wide (IE is still the most widely used browser by far).

So what do you need to do to see if your website is impacted? Follow these steps below to check your website and then take steps to correct the problem.

It might surprise you to find that the data that appears to be so neatly organized inside files and folders on your computer is actually more jumbled than a bucket full of Scrabble letters.

While a computer’s hard drive is very precise in remembering where it has stored your data, it does tend to store it in some strange places from time to time.

Unlike a neatly organized filing cabinet, your computer breaks up large files into smaller file fragments tailored to fill the first available free spaces on your hard drive.

This process of saving file fragments in the first available slot on your hard drive forces your computer to work harder to read an entire file from start to finish. Because the computer must work harder to read a particular file or program, it takes more time to complete even a simple task like sending an email. Organizing these scattered file fragments into one continuous file on your hard drive is called defragmenting.

To better understand the concept, imagine picking up today’s newspaper and reading a front page article. After a few paragraphs you are asked to turn to another page to continue reading the story.

It takes you some time to open the paper, turn to the proper page, and find the story to continue reading. Now imagine that you are required to move to a different page after each paragraph of the story. It would take a lot more time to read the fragmented story than it would have if the story was printed on a single page.

The same concept applies to your hard drive. It takes time for the mechanical components of your hard drive to skip all over your drive and locate all of the fragments of a single file. Over time, hard drives can become so fragmented that they begin to boot slower that they used to or seem sluggish when performing common tasks.

Regularly defragmenting your hard drive will take all of the file fragments that are scattered about your drive and organize them into complete files. Since you hard drive can now read the fragments as one continuous file, your computer will perform faster than it did in its fragmented state.