Yeo695

thanks, exactly what I was looking for.

Simple question(s) of the day 1. Are there different types of PDF files? (even though they are all .pdf) If yes... 2. Would the program used to create the pdf have an effect on this? 3. Would said different .pdf file possible not be readable on certain programs like Adobe Reader but work fine on Google Docs?

One of the best advice articles I've found so far. I know most of us repair computers on the side and I found this to be extremely helpful. Hopefully you guys find it useful as well. This is not mine just something I came across on TechSupport originally posted by user Form84. --------------------------- Hi There, So I figured I should contribute to reddit or something and write maybe a quick guide on how to be successful as a craigslist computer repair technician. Quick background on myself. 4 years ago, my wife and I were really poor, I was unemployed, she was working a minimum wage job, we were BARELY paying the bills every month, and we needed to find a way to pay for things without paying $1200 a month for daycare. So one day I decided to put myself out there on craigslist, and have learned many of these things as I've become successful doing it. I started out doing this with literally a phillips screw driver and my home computer. I now have a new car, an ipad I use solely for work, and all kinds of stuff, plus the ability to work from home, life is good. I help between 3-4 customers a day. I work typically about 3 hours a day, on my own schedule. I make about $150 a day on average. The average cost of doing this is roughly $10-15 a day depending on your vehicle, ISP costs, etc. Things you will need to start. $30 to purchase tools. (tool recommendations below) Lots of guides will tell you to buy a big computer toolkit, but you really don't need that. You need PATIENCE, I cannot overstate this enough, this will make or break your business! Your tools Cell-phone Car (optional, increases your income potential by alot tho) Mobile tools (if you have a car, pick up a cheap basic toolkit from a riteaid or something and just leave it in the car, you'll be surprised how often you use it) Ok, so having read all that you have decided to be a craigslist repair technician, awesome! If ya do it right, your life is gonna be awesome. So here goes. Pricing People come to craigslist to get deals and to save some money, realize that when your writing your ad. First lesson I learned pretty fast, is hourly rates DO NOT WORK. In the first two weeks of doing this, I initially charged $25 an hour, I got one customer in 2 weeks. Charge a flat rate! I charge a flat rate and plan on my jobs being fixed or resolved in under 2 hours. My charge is what I expect to do for 2 hours of work. So If you want to make $25 an hour, charge $50 to fix someones computer. This is a HUGE undercut of store services or the Geek squad or staples, your making a great wage, and Saving people a TON of money! You will be absolutely surprised at how often you'll get jobs that take only 20-30 mins to fix, then you just made $50 for 20 mins worth of work! Conversely tho, this is a #'s game, and you will run into jobs that end up taking for longer to fix than you originally planned. PATIENCE!!! Doing this kind of work will earn you FUTURE MONEY, suck it up and DO IT, NO COMPLAINTS to the customer either, JUST FIX IT! I've done screen replacements on unibody macbooks for $30 before, JUST DO IT! If you have a car, your going to be making more money, you can now charge a gas surcharge! Make it reasonable and this will become your bread and butter. 3/4's of what I do is on-site visits now a days, keep some dog treats on you when you go to new customers' houses, they'll freakin love you! Writing Your Ad Craigslist ads search off of the title and the body of the message. Make sure to ad things like pc repair, mac, etc to the bottom of the ad to make sure it gets the most visibility. Your ad will get flagged from time to time, and don't take it personally. There are quite a few people who make their money off of craigslist and your now a competitor. Have a good smartphone, get your email on your phone and repost the ad when it gets flagged, and THEY WILL GET FLAGGED. Your ad can be reposted 5x a day before your account gets locked til the next day. When someone flags your post, thats great, you just got to top post it for another at least 30 mins. It can be easy to develop flag and ad anxiety if this is your sole income, don't sweat it and just realize that these people are wasting more of their time than yours and enjoy the advertising "reminder". Keep your ad primarily in computer gigs, if possible also in the barter section if your willing to take trades. I have gotten so many tools, tablets, mp3 players, movies, tv's, tattoos, etc from having my ad in the barter section it really pays itself off. Got paid in gold dust once, that was kind of cool! Helpful software Ninite - Ninite.com saves me so much time since I probably do a windows install EVERY SINGLE DAY. People love getting free software and MANY of your customers don't know that the words Free and Antivirus can exist in the same sentence. You handing out free copies of Microsoft security essentials and open office is like giving lil charlie a golden ticket to your customers! Rkill, TDSSKILLER, Malwarebytes, OTM, Gooredfix - Common tools to remove viruses. All very useful and can fix most "viruses". There are tons of other alternatives to these, and use w/e your the most comfortable with, but I've found these are fast, lightweight, and easy to use for users, as many times I'll leave a copy with the customer to help themselves in the future. WinToFlash - This will let you "burn" any version of windows to a bootable usb stick and install it from it, just like the CD. Great laptops with broken dvd drives and netbooks, etc. Other things I keep around are common registry tweaks, like default_exe, taskmanager.reg, wallpaperenable.reg, InstallTake_ownership.reg, etc. Key tips! Your customers think of you in the same way that many people think of mechanics. They don't trust you, they think your going to try to screw them over. You will have to prove through your words and your actions that you are worthy of trust. Trust is your absolute best asset towards growing this kind of business. Many of your customers will be people that are FAR FAR FAR from literate with a computer. Patience and GOOD customer service are FAR more important to the benefit of your business than your actual skill with the computer. Patience will get you repeat customers! Repeat customers are the heartbeat of what you do, NEVER take any customer for granted. I helped a lady in a Starbucks once, she told her boss about me, I got a $1500 EMR contract to help migrate his dentist office to a new medical billing system. Be realistic and DON'T scare people. People don't want to hear "You have 300x things wrong with your computer". They want to hear "Oh, don't worry about that too much, I can fix it!" You will become their go to computer guy for anything. Be prepared to take phone calls and don't charge people for stuff like this. If your willing to bend a little and help people out, they won't be afraid to toss money at you like it's setting their wallets on fire. I once drove 30 miles to a guy's house to fix his WiFi only to find the WiFi switch was off, I didn't charge him and I've earned him as a repeat customer, and probably made $150 off of him over the course of a year. If i didn't eat the initial visit, I don't know If he would've kept me around. Be prepared to not make much for a while until your name gets out there. Your reputation is WORTH WAY MORE THAN ANY SINGLE JOB! Do not take any job your not comfortable with, or don't think you can fix. Be honest and upfront with people about expectations, and do your best to empower your customers to fix things themselves. They'll trust you and pay you for the convenience! Stand by WHAT YOU SAY, and be willing to go the extra mile for your customers, THEY WILL LOVE YOU! Take pictures of your customers on your phone, and write a small note on their contact (if you have a smartphone) so that you can remember them and what you did for them. You'll be helping lots of people every month and it can be very hard to remember them all, but people love knowing you remember them. BE SAFE! Write down any addresses to new customers and keep them around at your home if you don't know these people. Let people know where your going. You are dealing with people off of craigslist, yes most people are awesome, but be prepared for the crazies, which you WILL run into eventually. (yes, I Have crazy people stories) Tools Recommendations A precision screw driver set WITH HANDLES, do not get the skinny ones, you'll hate yourself for it. Something like this is good. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41PADNxaDfL._SL500_AA300_.jpg A set of normal steel-shafted screwdrivers. Stanley has a great set of steel-shaft screwdrivers with an interchangeable handle (not head). Cost like $10 A solder gun (if you know how, this can increase the variety of jobs you can take) $7 at radio shack. $3 for solder. An anti-static wristband is typically about $5-7 and is easiest to find in one of those computer toolkits, but can easily be ordered off of amazon also. A can of compressed air A tiny flashlight of some kind. No, your phone is not good enough, Go buy a $1 TINY flashlight that you can hold in one hand without having to mess with touchscreens, it will instantly become your favorite tool. At minimum a 4gb flash drive. That you can keep on your keychain. ----------------------- If you want to see the original or see some comments How to start being a computer repair technician off of craigslist. : techsupport

Thanks! I remember using this a long long time ago I just forgot about it.

Just contracted to clean up about 260 XP machines and 3 years worth of old user local profiles. I though about re-imaging but group policy has kept the computers fairly updated and clean except for local profiles. I have about a week to clean them up and was wondering if there is a better or faster way to delete profiles then from the server and browsing to the C:\Documents and Settings\%username%. From experience it takes about 30 mins for 100 profiles and that's if I don't run into any errors. What do you guys suggest? Any programs out there?

Tech Support Gore

So the beta flash version works for interactive issues but.... I'm not having an issue with Smart Response Teacher Tools, whenever I open it i'm prompted that my flash is out of date and needs to be updated. Any suggestions?

Thank you very much! Just what I needed and it works perfect

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong spot but usually when I dont know where to post it I post in general... I've been learning AHK for some time now and I constantly edit ridiculously large send commands. To easily be able to open up my AHK file and without having to scroll a few miles to the right and locate what i'm looking for. I've been trying to get splitting a long line into a series of shorter ones to work and it does but every time I start a new line with a comma in ahk it literally sends the comma. I've also tried and, && in the beginning but same thing happens. Any help would be greatly appreciated! For example ::unc::In relation to the work order you submitted about the account that needed to be created. ,{Enter}I was able to create the account with no issues. Here are the credentials {Enter} ,{Enter}Name: {Enter}Username: {Enter}Password: {Enter} ,{Enter}If you have any more issues,please feel free to let us know. ,{Enter} {Enter}Thank you, but what comes out is below with commas I don't want in bold red.

Usually the smaller the population in the area you live the better off you are with a name like that. Bigger place for example "Liver Pool Computers" is a horrible name, 1. Liver should never be in a business name unless it's a butcher and 2 it's not really local when the population is a half a million people. A good example of this would be "Clovelly Computer Solutions".

Chance IT why not .. Scam IT or ... Super Duper IT Special Value Discount Repairs actually now that i think of it... Dark Back Alley Repairs

When I made my own little computer repair company between a friend and I, we were young and decided to name it "PC 3VOLUTION" but since then regret it because our customer base is 80% elderly people who don't understand why there is a 3. So for short we call it "PC EVO." Now that we're expanding into graphic design, website design and video game server hosting. We're thinking about changing the name to something more generic. but if I've learned something. Keep it simple such as " Solutions" or " Computer Technologies"

I figured as much, and I search edu geek before I do a Google search when it comes to technology I'll continue my search and post if I find anything remotely like this.

Looking for a site or program... I'm not sure if this is the correct term for what I'm looking for but i'll just call it Global Internet traffic (hit) monitor. I had this concept pop up in my head about 20 minutes ago and found nothing useful in my searches. and I was wondering if it's already been done and if so where can I find it? I'm looking for a program or site that monitors the whole internet. Or at least the most popular news, social media, video, torrent, forums and sites like so. And categorizes the fastest growing pages. Not just the most hits overall. Said program or site would be like a cross between Reddit, Imgur, Stumbleupon and Google news if I could describe it. Common things such as facebook.com/login, google.com and of course porn would need to be filtered out. I would use such a thing to pass time and find the current most popular things going on in the interwebs. Just looking for suggestions or ideas, Thanks

I was able to fix it by resetting all ram and resetting the bios. Everything is good to go and that guide is actually fairly nice. I'll be sure to use it in the future.

I would avoid win 7 on these machines for numerous reasons. But if you must it should work enough to get by.

I envy your self control during a steam sale.

So I set out with plans to only spend $30 on the summer sale... With plans to only buy 3 games/dlc... I spent $121.11 on 13 games/dlc... It's only day 3.

I'm sure someone knows the HP beep codes by heart. I'm getting 5 beeps and that by definition from HP say "BIOS recovery successful". It does this every time upon start up. What i'm thinking is who cares, it was successful, no need to let me know with 5 loud beeps every time I start the computer. Or is it just that every time the computer gets shutdown the BIOS is failing and every time it starts up it's recovering. Computer is working flawless by the way, just the annoying beep code. Any way to get rid of? *besides a new mobo* So that's when I come to you guys asking for help or suggestions, I'm not very knowledgeable in HP beep codes or BIOS failures/recoveries. Edit: HP Brand Desktop. Model Slipped my mind. Resolution: I was able to fix it by resetting all ram and resetting the bios.

What is "The Dude"?

I may of just found something, exactly what i'm talking about just no as organized as I thought it would be. Network Mapping | Network Maps | Network Mapping software :: OpManager

I didn't know where to post this so I just threw it up in general chat... I recently visited a near by school and they just received a $3,000,000.00 technology overhaul in the whole school. Needless to say their tech office has a 12 monitor monster computer and one of the monitors on the computer has a Live Network Map. Essentially it's one of those fancy maps with the pretty pictures of the computers, switches and servers but it's actively showing that it running. And I want one. I know I can get a network map from a server but I'm talking about a massive network map that covers all of the school buildings (5 buildings in total) in the district. It would be something like 500 desktop computers, 400 laptops, 12 servers, a bunch of switches. And everything or at least the servers and switches have a live ping always running and when say something is off/down/ or can't connect it shows it in the map. Check out the links below for somethings that i'm looking for. http://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/img/nc200205fFig1.gif http://www.manageengine.com/network-monitoring/images/network-map-configurations.png Any help or ideas would be appreciated.

Because nothing official says the name is 720, that's just people throwing ideas around. Official code name is "Durango" and official name in the running is "Xbox Infinity"

Not even close. You actually get to play as the major heroes themselves and there is a pretty big skill tree for each hero. Also a multitude of costumes. Not to mention gameplay is nothing like DCU. It's from the same studio who made Diablo 1 and 2 but under a different name. It plays like Diablo mixed with Boarderlands but has way more detail in it. And it's free to play.

And who goes around with .theme files on the USB stick?