Daily Cup of Tech

A very useful trick from What’s My Pass? if you can’t access your Vista box:

Using BackTrack Live CD which can be found ::here::

For those of you who forgot your spiffy new Vista Logon password. Here’s a quick and dirty way to make a new user account. BTW, this has been around since XP but still useful.

Boot into Backtrack and open a shell prompt:

cd /mnt (change directory to mounted drives)
ls (get the list of mounted drives)
cd sda1 (sda1 is the main hard drive)
cd Windows/ (change to the windows directory)
cd System32/ (change to the system directory)
mv Utilman.exe Utilman.old (backup original file)
cp cmd.exe Utilman.exe (copy cmd.exe as utilman.exe)
reboot

once rebooted, at vista logon screen, Press Windows key + U
To invoke Utility Manager ( A.K.A. CMD.exe)
Cmd.exe will spawn with ‘System’ privileges.
c:\>net user S00perAdmin mypassword /add
c:\>net localgroup administrators S00perAdmin /add
Reboot and log in with your newly added Admin account

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There are a lot of people out there who are sending our e-mail after e-mail and offending everyone on their way, completely oblivious to what they are doing. We all experience them regularly. these are the people who WRITE IN ALL CAPS, > > > > > forward e-mails that have been forwarded several times previously, use REPLY ALL to respond to distribution lists, and attach 50 MB files that clock up our Internet connections.

Here is a great cheat sheet that you can print out and leave on their desk to that they can get the e-mail act together.

Update:  I originally had the pdf embedded in the post but too many people were having problems with it (see comments below).  It is now just a simple link.  That will teach me to try and get fancy.  Sorry about the trouble.  -Tim

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If you are running a small office of a couple dozen employees and you have Windows 2003 R2, you can easily centralize your contacts for your entire office along with give everyone the ability to see the company’s corporate calendar without having to install Exchange in your environment.

With Windows 2003 R2, you also have a copy of Sharepoint services. Sharepoint allows you to create workspaces for your different working groups. It is generally designed to work for either relatively large companies or working groups that are widely distributed. But, if you are neither, you have this technology at your disposal and you might as well put it to good use.

By creating a central contacts and calendar in the Sharepoint services, your users can connect to then using Outlook. This way, is is really easy for them to find contact information for anyone in the company or see what is happening on the corporate calendar right from a tool they already use.

You may even want to expand things a bit more and share your own calendar using Sharepoint so that people can see when you are busy or not and allow them to better select meeting times. Or, instead of just putting in company contacts in Sharepoint, you can also put in vendors and clients so that this information is readily available for everyone in the company to use.

One other nice aspect about doing things this way is that it is also useful for the road warrior. Outlook caches a copy of all the contacts and calendar information locally on your hard drive so that when you are on the road with your laptop, all of the contacts and calendars are still available, even though you may not be able to connect with your Sharepoint server.

Now, if you do not have access to a Sharepoint server, you do have some other options, most free or open source.  Here are just a few:

• eGroupware
• phpGroupware
• OpenGroupware.org
• PHProjekt
• horde
• Simple Groupware

What are you using for online collaboration?  Let us know what works and what doesn’t work in the comments.

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When you have a significant system failure like we did, things have a tendency to get a bit crazy rather quickly. There are several reasons for this, some of which include:

• You are under a lot of pressure to get things done as quickly as possible
• People outside of the IT department may have little or nothing to do
• Many tasks have only one person in the company with the skills to perform the tasks at hand
• Everyone’s individual need, in their opinion, is the most important task that needs to be completed first

Because this is such a stressful time, it is important to keep a clear head and manage the situation as quickly as possible. I have put together a few key action items that you can do when this happens to you so that you can keep things on track.

Read the rest of the story…

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I recently have begun to pursue my own business, as a consultant and repair technician, on a more consistent basis and have found some truths that may apply to others in a similar situation.

1. It is very difficult to build your client base on word of mouth referrals.

One may hand out business cards by the handful to anyone they think may have a computer. They may pass out ad fliers by the bucket, and still will likely need to pay for some form of advertising, to find enough clients to start a full-time venture. I have found that local free newspapers are a very economical way to start, their coverage is hit and miss, but the return is strong on a per dollar spent basis. Direct mailing may be another alternative in your area.

2. People won’t know what you do from a business card.

Business cards are a very nice way for people to find you once they know what you do. However, unless you have a very small, specific business model and a matching company name, it is not enough for people to know what you do.

On my first business card I made the mistake of including a picture of a laptop and the words, “Mobile Computer Maintenance & Service”, I lost many potential customers to the thought… “He probably only works on laptops.” Oops, the mobile was supposed to mean I would make house calls, not that I only worked on “Mobile Computers” Argh!!

I have since changed it to a generic “Computer Services” and I have printed fliers with a more complete description of the services I offer. I will be putting them on doors of homes and passing them out to businesses in the more affluent local areas.

3. People don’t really know what they want or need.

They may know that they want their computer to run “like it used to” or that they want a new hard drive, but, don’t expect them to know more. You will have the blessing of a few who know more than that, just don’t count on it. If they knew enough to know what their computer needed, they would fix it themselves. For this reason you must be prepaired to tell them what they need, or help them decide what they want.

4. People don’t know their computers… at all.

This is going to be true of 90% of the people who need your help. [Odds are pretty good you don’t hire someone to come fix your computer.] Be prepared to find a completely different system than they described on the phone. “It has a 40GB C: drive, a 60GB D: drive & 1GB of memory”, may turn out to be a 20GB C: drive, a 40GB D: drive and 512MB of RAM.

It is important to show the customer what they have, especially if you need to take the system with you. Show them, put it in writing and have them sign it. Someone who believes they had bigger drives and more memory before you took it, will soon forget how much better it was, when they stumble across these actual figures. There is also a good chance that they won’t want to pay you for the additional memory you installed, if the total memory i what they thought they started with.

5. People want to treat their computer like a piece of furniture.

They expect a chair to be there, do the job they bought it for & get a little dirty, yet more comfortable. They don’t generally think there should be anything more to it. Computer maintenance is a mystery to them and they can get quite upset when it is needed.

“I turned it on and it wasn’t right anymore.” This maybe as simple as a missing quick launch tool bar, or a shortcut dragged into a folder. It maybe a system bogged down with junk software and viruses or with failing hardware. It doesn’t really matter to them what the problem is, just as long as you can make it better.

And remember every icon, tool bar & shortcut is sacred to them, NEVER move them or change them. It will matter little to the client that you caught the failing CPU fan before damage occurred, if they can find the shortcut to the folder with aunt Martha’s email attachments. You would not move their bedroom furniture, trust me… Many find this sin as bad.

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