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

We closed the Schrock Service Centers early today for our annual company BBQ. Schrock employs more people than ever, so the BBQ gives everyone an opportunity to tie a face to the telephone extensions between Omaha and Lincoln.

This year we held the BBQ in Omaha at my house. We have 1/3 of an Acre in South Omaha, and our employees’ kids made the most of it. I have to admit that one of the best parts of our BBQ’s is watching all of the kids have a blast playing together.

Did you miss the show this week? Listen to the commercial-free recording here!

The first part of the show was a top ten list of technology fails of the decade. Next Thor moved on to the virus that has been nagging the FBI for over a week. Callers asked about some tricky marketing messages and how to avoid them, Norton 260, Adobe Acrobat updates and more.

Before you get blind sided by a huge automatic update next week, you should know that Microsoft’s latest major update will not install on your computer without some additional preparation.

This morning Microsoft released Vista Service Pack 2 for manual download. It should start automatically downloading to your PC within the next 10 days. You need to prepare your computer for this BEFORE it happens.

If you do not do these things, your computer will not be able to successfully install Vista Service Pack 2.

BEFORE you allow Service Pack 2 to install you must do the following:

* Install Windows Vista Service Pack 1. You can’t install Service Pack 2 without first installing SP1. If you try, the installation will fail and could damage your Windows Vista installation.
* Install the Microsoft Servicing Stack Update. This is the most complicated Service Pack that Microsoft has ever released. For it to even install properly a patch has to be downloaded and installed first!
* Backup your data. If something goes wrong during the installation process, you don’t want to lose everything.

We have a bit of a lunch tradition at Schrock Innovations. Each day one of my employees asks, what are we getting for lunch? The chorus of “i don’t know” and “not Jimmy Johns again” normally echos through our 2,000 square foot service center.

After some discussion we all agree on a place and each employee takes a turn buying lunch for everyone else.

Scott suggested we try something new as a favor to him. He told us we would not be sorry. He asked if we could order lunch from White or Wheat Sandwich Shoppe.

On Compute This, the term “whaling” was discussed. No, this is not another word for fishing; it is a word that describes online attacks for account information. We also touched on Google’s fail that happened earlier in the week. Google’s search engine was down for several hours, leaving users unable to use the site. We […]

The Lincoln, NE Police Department is looking for a Dell Inspiron notebook with service tag JKXQHC1. It was stolen in Lincoln, NE on or around May 13, 2009.

If you have any information about the location of this notebook, please contact the Lincoln Police Department’s non emergency number at 402-441-6000.

What is whaling and why does Steve Jobs care? On Compute This, we talked about the term “whaling.” Whaling is a term similar to phishing except that big names are targeted for maximum impact. Over the past month, several whaling attacks have taken place against wealthy executives and individuals. The reason for whaling these people […]

I was white hot mad. My son was crying. I looked for a supervisor to communicate my disappointment to. There was not one that could be found. That was the end of it. I was left to return to our room angry, upset, frustrated, and disappointed while at the same time trying to console a 2 year old who just didn’t understand.

At that moment it hit me like a brick wall. There are only three kinds of service in the world. I had just experienced bad service and I didn’t like it. The other types are good service and exceptional service.

After I had calmed down a bit I thought, I wonder if we had ever sent a customer away from Schrock feeling like I just felt. In that moment I resolved that that I would do everything in my power to make sure that no customer ever leaves Schrock with a bad service experience.

I know some people reading this just said virtu-what? In English, Microsoft has announced that in Windows 7 you will actually be able to run Windows XP as a program – just like you would run Internet Explorer or Microsoft Word.

The Windows XP Virtualization will be available in Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate only – lower versions will not support the feature.

This is not unlike the upgrade program that was offered by many PC manufacturers to avoid the problem that always plagued OEM’s just before the release of Windows Vista. People tend to wait for the new OS rather than continuing to buy PCs as they normally would. The end result is an unnaturally slow quarter for manufacturers followed by a massive next quarter. The upgrade offer tends to smooth things out a bit.

It is important to note that manufacturers may choose to extend this offer back even further at their own expense to include users who purchased computers before July 1.