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

Yesterday I was looking through the statistics form February on the Schrock Innovations website when suddenly my Internet Explorer browser popped up an alert that the site I was viewing could possibly be a phishing website.

Phishing (pronounced ‘fishing’) websites look like a legitimate website, but in fact attempt to steal personal information from you. For example, a phishing website might look like your bank’s website, but when you try to log in using your online banking password you inadvertently give your credentials to an online crook.

Obviously, the Schrock Innovations statistics page is not trying to steal and information from anyone, so this was a false detection! I had never seen a false detection before in Internet Explorer’s Phishing detection engine, so I was naturally curious why Microsoft thought my web page was a phishing website.

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Last week I appeared before the committee discussing LB583 – a bill that would attempt to increase the recycling of E-waste at the expense of local businesses like Schrock Innovations.

Despite my efforts to reach out to many of my competitors in Lincoln and Omaha, I was the only individual who appeared to testify in opposition of LB583.

There were however, three other national groups who submitted letters of opposition. The proponents were represented by Senator Priester, WasteCap Nebraska, CP Recovery, The Sierra Club, and others.

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I handled a situation in my Lincoln Service Center last week that is becoming more and more common in the computer repair industry. Every business has its cycles, and in the computer industry companies that offer more service at slightly higher prices are always competing against companies that offer less service and slightly lower prices.

In this particular case, Schrock Innovations shared a customer with a national-chain big box store in town. This customer had purchased her HP Pavilion from the box store, but always choose Schrock Innovations to work on her PC because of our higher levels of customer service.

Our customer’s computer had a “blue screen of death” that read unmountable boot volume. We diagnosed the problem as a bad hard drive, and as we would always do, we ran our stabilization software to move the customer’s data out of the bad sectors on the drive and into safe areas. The drive was still not bootable, but at least we could recover all of her data if she wished.

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There are two new Compute This shows posted on the Schrock Innovations website today.

Special thanks to Petro in Georgia for providing us with some audio we lost due to a technical “difficulties” (read the Windows Vista Woes post). Petro calls the show frequently and listens every week via KFOR’s online feed.

The majority of the two shows deal with our Maintenance Checkup Home Edition software release, but there were also some outstanding calls. The lovely Kimberly had a great PC Pizazz segment, and as usual, Chris sang along with some of the bumper music. All-in-all, they are a couple of GREAT shows, so if you missed them, take the opportunity to listen online!

Due to a technical difficulty with our new web server, we were forced to push the planned release of the Maintenance Checkup Home Edition computer maintenance software from this past weekend to today.

For those of you who want the “inside baseball” on what happened, we upgraded to a brand new web server to help us handle the demands that the new Home Edition software will place on our online infrastructure. We took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest versions of PHP, Apache, and Free BSD.

Somewhere along the line, some file paths were adjusted which temporarily disabled the updating function in our 2005 version of the Home Edition that all of our current subscribers are using. We were unable to transmit the new update over the weekend as planned, but the problem has been corrected this morning and the update to Version 2 of the MCHE will transmit to existing Home Edition users today.

If you are not a current Home Edition subscriber, you can download and install a FREE 90-day fully functional trial of the beta software. to download a copy, please visit http://mche.schrockinnovations.com/downloadtrial.php.

If you experience a problem with the new Home Edition, please visit our support website at http://mche.schrockinnovations.com/support.php

The International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Organization for Standardization have proposed a symbol change so that you will be able to know when you are in the presence of a severe radiation danger.

The new symbol, pictured left, was in development for 5 years and tested in more than 11 countries to ensure it would equally scare people of all ages and ethnicities. The funny thing is that when I looked at the new symbol and tried to put it into words, the first thing that came to my mind was that I could run away from death, but the radiation will get me anyway. That’s a pretty hopeless message!

This new, scarier symbol will be used to identify only the most dangerous sources of radiation such as food irradiators, cancer treatment equipment and industrial radiography machines. You will not see this terrifying symbol on the side of a semi-truck however.

The symbol won’t be on the sides of cancer treatment machines either (oh my gosh could you image!). However the world will be safe in knowing that if anyone attempts to take the cancer treatment machine apart, the symbol will suddenly appear inside the machine to inspire terror and fear.

So in the future, if you see this symbol you should probably move in an expeditious manner to the nearest exit. We don’t make this stuff up, folks. I don’t think I could if I tried.

This post is the last in a 10-post series about the all-new version 2 of the Maintenance Checkup Home Edition (MCHE) computer maintenance software from Schrock Innovations. You can win a FREE 2-year subscription by simply posting a comment on any of the MCHE posts. Only one free subscription will be given away, so post multiple comments or questions with your valid email address to increase your odds of winning!

Now that you have read all about the great things the all-new version 2 of the Maintenance Checkup Home Edition (MCHE) can do to keep your computer safe, we thought you might want to take it for a test drive before you buy it.

If you don’t win the 2 year free subscription by commenting here on my blog, you can download, install and use a fully-functional 90-day trial. Go ahead and use the MCHE free for three months and see how much safer your computer is. After the 90-day trial you can purchase it if you like, or just uninstall it. There is no commitment and no obligation.

As you use the MCHE, please take the time to visit our forum at www.mche.schrockinnovations.com and let us know what you think of the program. Almost all of the improvements in version 2 were made based on customer feedback from the 2005 version. We already have some exciting enhancements in the pipeline that should increase the functionality of the MCHE even further.

Listen to Compute This at 10:00 on KFOR 1240 in Lincoln Nebraska to find out who won, or check back here tomorrow when I will post the winner’s name, city and state.

This of you who read my blog regularly might remember a post from a couple weeks ago where I told the story of an angry customer that disputed their credit card charge after we had to call the police to have their daughter removed from our Service Center.

Today we received a notice in the mail that after reviewing the incident, our merchant card processing company sided with us and reversed the charge-back!

That means that our customer’s credit card was debited again for the transaction and the money from that debit was deposited back into our bank account.

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Yesterday I was on the closing segment of Drive Time Lincoln, hosted by Coby Mach on 1400 KLIN. I had about 6 minutes to explain what LB583 was all about and why I believe it is a bill that should be opposed. If you missed my original post, you can find my original post on it here.

In case you missed the appearance, we recorded the audio so we could post it on my blog. You can listen to the audio here.

This post is the ninth in a 10-post series about the all-new version 2 of the Maintenance Checkup Home Edition (MCHE) computer maintenance software from Schrock Innovations. You can win a FREE 2-year subscription by simply posting a comment on any of the MCHE posts. Only one free subscription will be given away, so post multiple comments or questions with your valid email address to increase your odds of winning!

There were 2 forms of support available for the 2005 version of the Maintenance Checkup Home Edition (MCHE) – the forum and email. There was never an official telephone support for the 2005 version of the MCHE, and this posed a problem for us.

On one hand, our local Lincoln and Omaha customers have become accustomed to calling our Service Centers and getting the help they need quickly and efficiently. But because more than 20,000 people world-wide have downloaded and installed the 2005 version of the MCHE, offering telephone support for those individuals would have been a daunting and expensive task.

While there is still no official telephone based support available for version 2 of the MCHE, we have recognized the need for more responsive support options for our subscribers. To help deliver this support, we have added another support professional to the MCHE support team and we have designed numerous automated tools to diagnose and repair potential problems with the MCHE for you.

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