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

If you frequent the Schrock Innovations Computer Repair website you may have noticed a new graphic on the bottom left corner of all of our pages. This is a tool provided free of charge by AltaVista that will allow you to instantly translate any page on the Schrock Innovations website into 8 different languages!

Since the launch of the Do It Yourself Computer Repair section of our website, we have been getting an ever increasing number of visitors from outside the United States. While our primary concern is always our local Nebraska customers, people outside of Nebraska and outside of the US also have computers and need help too.

For those of you who follow this blog, you have read about the MoviePass and MediaPipe software that seems to find its way on to people’s computers who have no recollection of installing it. The software is designed to provide you access to free video content and is usually installed when the user clicks on an advertisement online for free video content and installs their trial software.

30 days later, the MediaPipe software begins to demand its subscription fee though pop ups that increase in frequency until you pay.

There used to be a toll-free number to cancel the account that was opened in your name when you installed the MoviePass trial, but now that number is frequently too buy to get through, and when you do make it through it goes to voice-mail.The makers of MoviePass were undoubtedly barraged with callers seeking to cancel their accounts, so they have created a website where you can cancel your MoviePass subscription instead.

We have added another new computer help article to http://www.schrockinnovations.com. This article will show you how to increase your computer performance by setting your Windows XP based computer to run in performance mode.

Some of our customers have reported as much as a 25% performance gain by trading XP’s eye candy for horsepower! This one should be popular!

A company in China has created a browser called Maxthon that allows users to visit websites through their proxy server, and thereby avoid China’s aggressive censorship policies. The tiny Beijing company (also named Maxthon, has attracted millions of users in China for functionality that can circumvent government controls on information in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Baidu.com.

Here is an example. Do a search for the word Tienanmen at www.google.com (Here’s a link). The first results you see are about the Tienanmen Square Massacre where Chine ran over protesting students with tanks.

Last week a caller on the radio show asked how he could make a backup copy of his Outlook Express email messages. We successfully walked him through the steps on the air, and promised a step-by-step tutorial for everyone on the website.

Sorry about the outage this morning folks. I could just pull a “Baghdad Bob” and say outage? What outage? There was no outage…

The truth is we had to cooperate with an investigation that required our hosting company to pull some log files from our server. It required a few hours of down time, so for those of you who did not get your Schrock Blog fix, feel free to indulge now!

My uncle bought a new HP multifunction printer for my father and called me to come over and hook it up. I stopped by after work thinking it would only take a few minutes to get everything up and running. Boy was I wrong!

The printer is a photo quality printer that uses an HP 6-cartridge system to obtain high quality prints. I unpacked the system, started the software installing and followed the directions to get everything hooked up. When I powered the unit on for the first time, it informed me that one or more of the initialization cartridges were not installed correctly.

Here is something interesting I found today on the web that should keep you amused for a while. The internet archive is a repository of web pages form the past. In a way it acts like an internet time machine to show you what a website looked like years ago.

This website allows you to look at the revisions of a website over time going back as far as 1996. The Microsoft we all know and love today has a pretty advanced website, but that was not always the case.

I have teamed up with two other individuals to help launch a new anti-spyware website. It is located at http://www.databaseofspyware.com and it is designed to act as a global repository of all Spyware, Malware, and Adware infections. Eventually we will have manual removal instructions for all of the 7,500 infections that are currently housed on the site.

I found this story on an Australian news website. I have no idea if it is true, but either way it is funny.

Microsoft executives love telling stories against each other. Here’s one that platforms vice-president Jim Allchin told at a recent Windows Vista reviewers conference about chief executive Steve Ballmer.

It seems Steve was at a friend’s wedding reception when the bride’s father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look.