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

Over the past few days there has been a lot of concern about the Conficker virus that is expected to strike on April 1, 2009. Callers to my radio show asked me if they should be concerned, and my answer was pretty straight forward.

If the following describes you, you should be relatively safe from the Conficker virus:

* You have a genuine (not illegal) copy of Windows
* You have up-to-date Antivirus Software from a company like Symantec (not free antivirus from your ISP or Free AVG)
* You are current with your Windows Updates
* You can get to the website www.symantec.com

With that said, there are also important details about this infection that you should know to help keep your friends and relatives safe as well.

A few months back I wrote a post about why a recession is the perfect opportunity to use the assets you have to position yourself against your small business competition. I also encouraged my readers to make a plan based on your businesses strengths and not the strengths of their competitors.

If you are successful in gaining market share during slow economic times, that market share is coming directly from your competitors.

There is no doubt that recessions can be stressful on businesses, and if you are soaking up market share form your competitors their ability to pay their bills on time will be effected.

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.

Microsoft’s long-awaited Internet Explorer version 8 is complete and will be released this morning via at 11 A.M. CST as well as the Internet Explorer 8 Website and thousands of websites will be instantly broken by the new browser.

Everything about IE8 is pretty much run of the mill with a couple exceptions. IE8 will conform to standards set by other browsers such as Mozilla’s Firefox. As a result, websites that were coded to work exclusively on previous versions of IE may not display correctly in IE8.

If you own a website that is not displaying correctly in IE8, Schrock Innovations offers a special program where our web design staff can bring your website into compliance at a discounted hourly rate. Contact Schrock Innovations for more information on the program.

Some of you might remember that I wrote a post about a business I was trying to find an investor for through Corporate Acquisitions Group. The one year anniversary of that business listing is coming up on the 25th of March, and my agreement with Corporate Acquisitions Group states that if they can not find an investor for me, they will refund the $7,500 cost of the initial business valuation that was performed.

The agreement states:

Corporate Acquisitions Group will introduce a qualified buyer or investor that is interested in purchasing the above named company at a fair market value or Corporate Acquisitions Group will refund the dollar amount listed above.

My initial post generated a little controversy, as well as some strange phone calls and emails from people who claim that Corporate Acquisitions Group never paid them a refund, and some truly negative comments from readers about the company’s owner, Ty Tymkovich himself.

It is important to note that I have asked those who contacted me to provide copies of letters they claim to have received, but they will not. I have asked to see copies of the Service Agreement they signed, as I did, and they can’t produce one. This is the Internet and anyone can write ANYTHING. I have made the decision to find the reality in this situation myself and promise to share it with all of my readers.

Some of my friends have questioned the wisdom of expanding Schrock Innovations and hiring so many new people when the news on the economy is so dire.

I am by nature an optimist – often to a fault. But I believe that this recession is going to be the single greatest thing to ever happen to my company and here is why.

Hiring computer technicians is always hard for Schrock Innovations. Many PC repair shops can simply look for a person with good tech skills, but at Schrock we have to find a person with great tech skills, good people skills, and most importantly a dedication to customer service.

After nearly three weeks of searching, we found the person we needed in Jon Popek.

We have been busy at Schrock Innovations repairing click-jacking victims who have become infected with the latest fake-alert variant called AV 360. These fake antivirus programs infect your computer and tell you that to fix your PC you need to pay them $50 for a fully functional version of their program.

This stuff is infecting people running McAfee, Norton Antivirus and Internet Security, AVG, Avast, and numerous other widely used programs (NOT Norton 360 – more on that later). I wanted to take a moment to describe what click jacking is, how you get infected with Antivirus 360, and what you can do to prevent it.