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

eBay has announced some not-so-good news to the power sellers among you out there. For the seventh straight year, eBay will be raising some of the fees it charges sellers to post items for sale on the popular auction website.

While this year’s increase is moderate, it may further exasperate those who make a living on eBay by shrinking their profit margins. The auction giant is increasing the price for listing an item by $.05 and is also increasing the percentage it takes of all sales under $1,000.

While the move is not good news to anyone who buys or sells on eBay, there is some controversy about what the price increase means to eBay’s business model.

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About two years ago Schrock Innovations began bundling the Open Office Suite with our new Modular PCs. Open Office is a popular FREE alternative to Microsoft Office that offers word processing, spreadsheet, and database capabilities.

A critical flaw was discovered in Open Office that could allow an attacker to take control of a computer running Open Office. The most recent version of Open Office (Version 2.1) is not affected by this threat, so we recommend all Schrock customers using Open Office upgrade immediately to version 2.1. All computers built by Schrock Innovations (up to and including the 2006 Holiday Special) have version 2.0 or lower installed.

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Schrock Innovations has been developing web sites for our clients for a few years now, and in mid-2006 we started offering advanced SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. One of the biggest challenges that new website owners face is driving visitors to their new websites. After all, what good is it to develop a $2,000 website if no one comes to see it?

Websites are investments to business owners, and investments are expected to perform. To help meet this demand, Schrock Innovations started building a proprietary system to provide a quick way for business owners to get their websites ranked well in the search engines. For example, when you do a Google search for “remove popcorn.net” the #1 site listed is a Schrock Innovations tutorial. This does not happen by accident, contrary to popular belief.

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Just before the holiday weekend Adam successfully removed four particularly nasty spyware threats from a test computer using Version 2 of our Maintenance Checkup Home Edition software. Version 2 has been long awaited among our Version 1 (or legacy) customers, and for good reason.

Version 2, as it is called in the Omaha Service Center where it is being developed, sports some advanced features that were not available in the legacy version of the Home Edition. For example, Version 2 is pre-programmed to recognise and ignore almost every valid Windows and Microsoft file, as well as files from popular software programs such as Norton Anti-Virus, AOL, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Java, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and many more. These pre-programmed definitions are necessary to prevent false detections because some spyware programs will name their critical files with the same names as critical operating system files. Removing these operating system files can cause many problems, so it is important to check their validity and leave them alone.

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I dropped a few hints about the new 2007 Base Model Modular Computer System on our radio show Saturday, but for those of you who missed the show, the system in all of its glory is up for public view on our Computer Sale website.

This new section of our website was developed to accommodate the 2006 Holiday Special, but will be used throughout 2007 as a center where you can easily find information about our latest computer specials, or customize a computer to meet your own needs.

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I wanted to take a moment today to thank all of the customers that have helped Schrock Innovations have such a successful year in 2007. When we opened our doors in 1999 we had a simple mission statement – provide high-caliber service that is not available from other computer repair companies.

A lot has changed in technology since then, but Schrock Innovations remains an award-winning service provider. Thank you for choosing Schrock and thank you for recommending us to your friends and family. Many of our new customers this year were word of mouth referrals that did not even know about our radio show on KFOR, or our advertisement in the yellow pages.

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A new tutorial has been added to the Schrock Innovations DIY section. Some customers have reported receiving an “Error 10″ message when installing a Norton product such as Norton Internet Security or Anti Virus.

The normal uninstall / reinstall with a double reboot does not fix this problem, and the Norton Removal Tool alone is ineffective as well.

I was faced with this problem while on-site at a customer’s apartment in Lincoln, and designed the following solution to resolve the problem:

Resolve Norton Installation “Error 10″ Problem
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Today I dropped off our new web server at Binary.net; the company that maintains our online infrastructure for us. Our web server is housed in a bank vault behind a 17-ton door. I had the pleasure of touring the vault today to get acquainted with the environment our new server would be occupying.

Since 2005 we have placed exponential increases in bandwidth on our online equipment, and our plans for 2007 demanded a much needed upgrade.

Believe it or not, the engine that was maintaining the Schrock Innovations online technology machine was a simple one. A K6-2 450 processor, 256 MB of RAM, and a 30 GB hard drive was more than enough to provide ongoing updates for our Maintenance Checkup Home Edition software, serve all of our clients’ webpages, as well as the Schrock Innovations website as it has grown in national and international popularity.

But we have started setting our internal 2007 goals, and if we are going to meet them we were going to need more online power. A lot more power…

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Schrock Innovations teamed up with the City of Lincoln’s Recycling office to promote Lincoln’s local celebration of America Recycles Day. High school students were challenged to sign pledges to start recycling if they were not doing so already. Each signed pledge was entered into a drawing and sophomore Shelby Krause from Pius X was the lucky winner!

Coincidentally, the week before she won the new Holiday Special PC, their family’s Dell PC crashed completely and needed to be replaced. The computer has a retail value of $1499, and was presented to Shelby in a brief ceremony in front of the media in our Lincoln Service Center.
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I have just turned in my first article to my editor at Smart Computing magazine. I can’t go into detail about the subject of the article, but I can tell you that I found a way that the average computer user could save more than $2,000 in computer software on a new computer!

Smart Computing magazine is published right here in Lincoln, NE and is distributed internationally. A subscription to the magazine runs about $30 a year, but unlike other PC magazines, Smart Computing is not packed with ads. It is a content-rich magazine that I would recommend to anyone.

My article should appear in the March 2007 issue of the magazine, so make sure you get your subscription today!