Benjamin Burrows

The deck is stacked against us

Now I am really not trying to brag on myself with some comments later in this post.  I’m sure I’ve missed things in the past and I’m just really happy with this most recent “catch.”  I do not know everything and I am not the perfect tech.

In our jobs as computer techs there are some fundamental skills that make us good.  I have always felt that troubleshooting skills tops my list.  Then of course you need knowledge and experience.  I have argued many times that people right out of college or a certification have that knowledge now but if they have no troubleshooting skills or experience they are almost useless.  If you’ve ever taken your computer to geek squad, Staples, or similar then you know what I’m talking about!  I guess you have to have people skills too but if you are just working in the back of a shop then that isn’t as important.  If you want to start a business or have to interact with customers then it is important.

I am rather proud of a recent experience but it makes me realize that “the deck is stacked against us.”  Working on laptops can be troublesome to many shops.  There are so many different setups and proprietary configurations that it is hard to figure out what is really wrong with a laptop.  Case in point is a laptop I received Monday afternoon for a DC jack repair.  I always go through some checks and testing before I start tearing apart a laptop.  In the past I have received several that really didn’t have DC jack problems, just a bad charger.  In all honesty that is a bit frustrating for me because I look forward to that chance to make that money.  Oh well, at least I can normally make a couple of dollars on one of the universal laptop chargers I sell.

So through testing I found that the DC jack was fine and the unit powered on a couple of times for me.  However the LED light stopped working and then it eventually would not power on??  I knew it was getting juice but it just refused to turn on.  Luckily for me I had another working DV6000 sitting around in my home office so I had some spare parts to test with.  Now I will admit one of my downfalls here and luckily it doesn’t happen too much.  When I am thrown a “curve ball” I do not always react right.  I honestly get a little frustrated and normally just step back and think for a few hours or day.  It was getting late Monday night so I figured I needed to think about it and get back to it when I had more energy.  To me the logical part to go bad would be the little circuit board that has the power button and LED on it.  So that was the first thing I tried, no luck.  So I pulled other hardware and inspected connections just to get an idea of what was going on.  Finally I thought I would try the ribbon cable.  On these models there is a 6-8″ ribbon cable from that little circuit board that runs to the motherboard.  I replaced it and magically the computer started up!!!

Now I mention all of this just so you can marvel at my superior troubleshooting skills.  So you can pray to your God that he grant you my awesome powers!!  Also so you can realize how much better I am than you!  No seriously, I’m sorry for that.  Like I mentioned above, I know I’ve probably missed stuff on past systems.  I am just so happy that this laptop even powered on a few times at the beginning.  If it would not have then I honestly probably would not have figured out what was wrong with it.  Since almost all laptops are different how are we seriously supposed to be able to fix them?  Fortunately most of us have decent troubleshooting skills so we can figure it out and then we even luck out sometimes by having parts on hand to test with.  It makes me wonder how HP would have fixed it?  Do they have some type of miracle tester that just hooks up to it and tells the tech what is wrong?  This type of repair is quite satisfying though.  Especially when another shop said that it was the DC jack and the repair would cost $400!!  With proper troubleshooting though, it really ended up being a $6 ribbon cable!!

Back up your Backups!!

Once again just a few days ago I saw another Western Digital external hard drive that just pretty much died.  There was nothing I could do, I tried many tools but the drive was not recognizable.  Even though there were great family memories on the drive, the customer could not afford the $2K+ on recovery.  I wonder though, this is the second Western Digital drive.  Is this a coincidence?  I like Western Digital drives but have noticed a higher failure rate with them lately.  I wonder if their QC is going downhill?

The customer thought they were doing the right thing.  I have to give them credit, at least they had a backup plan.  It’s just unfortunate that one drive was the only part of that plan.  They asked for help and advice to make sure this wouldn’t happen again.  There are several different options out there but they all require money and time, something “home” computer users generally do not have.  I personally have a laptop that has two drives so I backup to the extra drive.  I also have about 7 external drives, with only 5 of them in service.  The others are smaller and/or older so I took them out of my backup routine and actually plan to send them to members of my development team so they have additional hardware to test and play with.  My desktop has 3 hard drives in it, one for the OS and the other two are for backups and archiving.  I have wasted spent a lot of money over the years on those drives and that is not something that “home” users want to do.

Generally I recommend that customers backup to at least one external drive and keep backups on DVDs.  My general idea for DVDs is to backup all data monthly or at least every other month depending on how much data they add.  I like the idea of redundancy with DVDs because they are cheap and I honestly do not completely trust them.  Manufacturers always report that their discs will last 100 years or more but I find that hard to believe.  It also depends on the environment that they are kept in, that affects life span.  I’ve had a few CD-RWs that after 3-4 years were unreadable.

Then there are online services.  I personally do not like or trust cloud computing.  I do not like the idea of my data sitting somewhere else.  What happens if there is a security problem on their end?  Will the nude “art” photos of myself end up on the Internet for everyone to see?!!?  Seriously though, I’ve read too many stories of these online services going out of business and leaving their customers with no data.  Sometimes you luck out and receive a warning, but the traffic to their site from all customers hurrying to get their data usually kills your ability to get your data.  Most of them though are just shut down with no warning and your data is lost forever.

Time is a big problem too.  “Normal” people have “real” jobs and family that get in the way.  Backing up irreplaceable data is not important enough to them, even after a disaster.  Even us computer geeks can fall short.  I’ve had a few occasions where I didn’t back something up or my backup was messed up.  I honestly forget to back up regularly also.

This last customer had a pretty good idea though.  I don’t know if my local market is big enough for it though?  I doubt that we could really compete with the online pricing either?  A local service for data backup does sound pretty good.  It would give me a really good excuse to finally build a “real” server for myself though!  I wish I had the money to do it and wish that I knew if it would at least pay for itself in the end.

In conclusion, please be prepared.  Warn your friends, colleagues, family, and others of the possible disaster that not having a good backup plan can cause.  If you need another external drive, please check out my Burrows Solutions site.  I always have great deals on external drives.  If there is a model that you want that isn’t listed, please contact me.  I’ll bet I should be able to save you at least $10 on the drive you want.  Make sure you are prepared though, you normally can’t recover from one of these disasters.

Apple is #1!

Most admired?  Really?
Link to Story

This story makes sense.  Of course executives admire Apple.  They wish they could figure out a way to rip people off and get away with it!!  Is the American public that clueless?  Don’t get me wrong, Apple does make some good looking stuff and they do think hard when they develop something.  However I personally can’t get around the fact that they sell hardware that costs them $5 for $100+!!  I understand (but do not totally agree to some extents) that business need to make money and needs money for R&D, etc.  I just do not think they need to make that much money.  They do not need to sell a $800 computer for $1700 just because some people are stupid enough to pay that.  So I wonder if you actually admire them after you spent $150 on an iPod instead of a SanDisk for $80?  The products may be easy to use and look sexy but how can you admire a company that fleeces you so badly?  Maybe I just have issues?  Maybe I am just cheap?

What do you think? Should Apple be admired? Does the American public admire Apple that much?  Do you feel that your iPod or iPhone was honestly a good deal?

My crystal ball

Hello, hello, is this thing on??  Damn I really hate my crystal ball it never seems to work for me!  Normally when I make a prediction and make it public it is wrong.  Oh well, I’ll give it a try anyways.

Keep an eye on NewEgg!  I just happen to get Acronis True Image in my head a little while ago and though I would check the pricing at NewEgg.  I had recommended it a few weeks ago to a customer and it was roughly $23.99.  I don’t have any in stock at Burrows Solutions and really can’t beat that price so I am a good guy and will just recommend that people order it straight from NewEgg.  Today that same option is $38.99, however a MIR just started for the item today.  That $20 MIR is good starting today through the 11th.  I don’t like how they increase the price just because they start a MIR but understand why they do it.  Now the thing that interests me though is past promotional patterns.  I’m pretty sure that any other time Acronis has had a MIR that NewEgg usually ends up putting out a promo code in one of their promotion emails.  With that you can usually end up paying only $5 to $10 after the MIR for some great software.

So like I mentioned above, keep an eye on NewEgg for the next week.  If you are in the need of the latest version of Acronis True Image I suggest you wait until the last minute (order on the 10th).  I only suggest this because I really feel there may be a better deal coming?  If I’m wrong then you should still purchase it because $18 after MIR is pretty good, just wait several days though.  I will keep an eye on my inbox and hope to see an Acronis promo code soon.  I’d really like to upgrade to the newest version!!

Trains

Another item with deep love from my childhood has always been trains.  I honestly do not know what the fascination is?  Back in the 80’s they always had a caboose and they always looked cool.  The “engines” also always had cool color schemes.  There are many different types of cars too.

I never really cared for graffiti though?  Sure I spray painted the sides of bridges and stuff but only to write “Poison”, “Skid Row”, “Warrant”, or “POR.”  For some reason that is acceptable to me?  I have never really liked the “fancy” graffiti where these “artists” waste several cans of paint and a lot of time on something.  I’ve never liked it on train cars and it generally makes me a little mad.  However, just recently I found a car in my area that I felt was funny.  I think the simplicity of the message is what makes me enjoy it?  We’ve driven by it several times over the last week and my oldest finally snapped a picture of it for me today on his cell phone.  I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I do:”“

Another long weekend

I’m telling you, sometimes I wonder why I do all of this.  I get frustrated and just want to quit.  However I remind myself that I am not a quitter and little stumbling blocks can not and should not take me down!!

It all started late last week when I woke up and found our sites were down.  So I had our server rebooted and then everything was fine, well sort of.  I didn’t realize it until later that afternoon that something was wrong with my Burrows Solutions site.  So I called again and then had to submit a support ticket.  Friday morning I hadn’t heard anything so I was wondering what was going on?  Well I found that I had submitted a support question to myself, I’m so silly sometimes!!  So I submitted a real one and the fun began.  In the process of trying to fix the store our new support forum and chat feature became screwed up.  Luckily the support staff at IPB kicks ass, the forum was fixed in 50 minutes.  Finally in the end my full site backup ended up finally working!!  So instead of moving from Zen Cart to Mangeto (or something else) I finally ended up fixing the site.  Technology really drives me nuts sometimes.  I do not know everything but luckily I keep backups and most problems really aren’t that hard to fix.  It’s so silly to get so mad and worked up when one problem happens after 8 months of little or no problems.  I was so frustrated I just wanted to say to hell with it and move away from Zen Cart.  That would have taken away all my customizations and I would have spent many hours setting up a new store.  I am so glad right now that the backups finally worked.  I really hope everyone else had a better weekend that I!!

I hate support forums

This coming from a guy that runs two of them!  I honestly do not hate them but they can be quite aggravating!!  I had the inspiration for this post about 2 weeks ago but I’ve been busy so I kept putting it off.  I’ve also been wanting to start our new forum for at least the last year.  Plans and ideas have evolved so now is about the right time to launch it.

I was attempting to research a problem I had never encountered before by searching with our good buddy Google.  Of course I found several support forum posts and like usual they were useless.  I love all the smart ass and lazy “reinstall Windows” comments.  Why are so many forums littered with that worthless suggestion?  I have no problem admitting that I do not always have the time to find the cause for every problem, customers want their computer now and my boss doesn’t want to pay me for 6 hours on one problem.  It is just frustrating to have to dig through several different forums and pages of posts to finally find the right answer.  Sure sometimes the problem can be caused by a few different things also so one fix may help one person but not help the other.

So now onto the Burrows Solutions Support forum!  Ok my plan really isn’t to have the perfect or best forum, I really do not think that is possible.  I just hope to create a new community to continue helping computer users.  Since my development team and I have several different projects, future projects, and ideas we thought it would be a good idea to start a new forum.  A place to support all projects and try to help with other problems.  I really hope that I will be able to find the time to help more people with information that I find.  Basically like my example above, I would like to try and condense the information I find about a problem.  Tell you what fixed the problem for me and give you other fixes that might work.  Then hopefully you will find the time to reply and let us know what fixed the problem for you.  I truly hope that you will find the information helpful and that you will find the time to help out also.

So please head on over to our new Burrows Solutions Support forum and check it out.  It is currently the home of our UBUSB tool and will be the future home for UBDVD and UBDVD4Win7.  We have a nice chat feature over there also and hope that will help us better support more people when we have free time to chat.  It does currently have some limitations but we can pay for the ability to allow more people to chat at once.  I hope you understand when I say that I would rather wait and see if paying for it is necessary.  I would just hate to spend the money on something that is never used.  So I really hope that people use it and complain that they can not chat because they aren’t allowed to.  Once I see a lot of traffic in there, receive a few “complaints”, and have some extra cash I will pay the additional fee.

UBUSB, what is it?

I think that very few of our users know and/or pay much attention to what we include in UBCD4Win?  I will admit that part of this is my fault because I honestly do not always have the time to put up all the proper documentation on our website.  UBUSB.exe has been included in UBCD4Win for at least a year now and has been actively developed in our support forum.  I will say that Tom has done an excellent job with the tool and it works pretty well.  However because of the lack of me being able to update the UBCD4Win site in a timely manner and sometimes not having all the information I need for it I think very few people have really used UBUSB.  Very few of our users utilize our support forum anyways.

So I am happy and proud to help Tom announce the latest build of UBUSB!  It is still technically a beta but we need your help testing it more and making sure it is stable.  A really cool and nice compatibility that he has been able to work into it is that it will work with Windows 7 to a certain degree.  It does not have full Win7 support, but the tool will run and create your bootable USB drive while you are in the “XP Compatibility mode.”  All you have to do is attach it to the VM and it will work.  He does promise better support for Vista and Win7 but only in 32bit versions.  We need to do more testing with that.

If you are interested in having a bootable USB version of UBCD4Win, I highly suggest you check out the post in our forum here:
http://ubcd4win.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=11375&view=findpost&p=79840
In that announcement you will find some information, instructions, and download links for the tool. Please test it out and let us know what you think and if you happen to run into any problems.

Buy from a local shop!

I am always looking at new ideas for the business.  I see what the competition is doing and keep an eye on their prices.  These “big store” guys like Best Buy and Staples drive me nuts.  I’m sure some of them provide good services but from what I’ve heard and read most of them do not.  The arrogant college guys/gals that you deal with are enough to make you suicidal.  They do not offer advice, they are only trying to up sell.  Most of the time they don’t even know what they are doing, they are as bad as overseas support that reads from a script.  Now I can’t say that all small shops are good.  I know there are a few local guys and shops that only care about money and won’t be honest with customers and provide good advice.

I was looking through a Staples ad a couple of weeks ago and something caught my eye.  I really wish I would have gotten a screen shot or a copy of the paper ad but I forgot.  I was also hoping that the “offer” would be advertised for a few weeks.  They offered 3 different services for new computer purchases.  The middle option, “Uninstall unwanted programs and icons” is what caught my attention.  You have to pay Staples $99 to remove craplets??  Well at least they also install up to two programs for you also.  Now how about I buy a computer from a local shop?  Their price is probably going to be roughly $99 more than at Dell.com or from Staples, but at least it shouldn’t come with craplets!  Well unless you are lazy and just sell Dell computers like a local shop does.  I guess it is too much work to piece together quality parts and build a good system for your customers??
I have to give Staples a little credit here though, at least they realize that the computers they sell are not really ideal. However I don’t think that 10 minutes of uninstalling items from Control Panel is worth $99!  It is nice to see Staples trying to help us little guys out a little with these services.  If customers actually pay attention (which they usually don’t) to the big picture rather than being cheap, they would buy their systems from us little guys!!

Where is the Super AntiSpyware love??

We are all entitled to our opinions.  I swear by Kaspersky and we sell it at the shop I work at, while others like Eset, AVG, and others.

One trend that bothers me a little is how opinions shift.  We maybe that is not the right way to word it but my brain is a little frozen still from shoveling myself out of my driveway.  We finally had a decent snow storm yesterday and I had to fire up the snow blower at work!!  Fun stuff.  Years ago the big names were AdAware and Spy Bot.  They both did a pretty good job and still continue to do so to a degree.  A few years ago Super AntiSpyware appeared and everyone fell in love with it.  It was recommended everywhere!!  Then Malware Bytes AntiMalware came out and it has turned into the AdAware/Spy Bot battle.  Who is better?  I honestly do not know.  I use both at work and it is just like the old days, one finds stuff the other doesn’t find and vice versa.  I have personally dealt with both companies and quite honestly have to side with Super AntiSpyware.  The people at MBAM are very rude and cocky.  Dealing with SAS is much better and their people seem to actually care a little.  Now I will mention that I do sell SAS on my Burrows Solutions website and at work, so you could think I am bias.  I really do not feel that I am.  Like I mentioned, I’ve dealt with both and SAS is just more pleasant to deal with.  Both software titles will have their ups and downs, catch something new before the other does, and so on.  My backing though is with SAS.

So where is the SAS love at??  Why is everyone only recommending MBAM anymore?  I think it is really important to at least use both of them but I trust my real-time scanning to SAS.  What is your opinion?