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

There is an adage that says you can’t please all of the people all of the time, yet in business rule number one is that the customer is always right. Since opening Schrock Innovations I have seen a lot of situations where I knew that our product or service was not at fault, however the customer believed it was, so we did everything we could to make things right. We understand the value of good service at Schrock, and we work hard every day to be the best. But what should a business do when a customer “crosses the line?”

Background: A customer bought a $1500 computer from us in November. After two warranty support calls in 80 days, the customer was concerned that the system was a “lemon.” Understanding their concern, we agreed that the best solution would be to replace the entire unit with a new system just to be safe. We informed the customer we would be happy to bring the new system to their home, install it for them set everything up and install their programs for them. Our customer said they wanted to think about it, and we didn’t hear anything for a few days on it.

After a week, the customer’s adult daughter called us about the matter and that is when things started going downhill fast.

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It was an weekend to remember… It took 2.5 hours to UPGRADE to Windows Vista Ultimate and another half an hour to install Office 2007 on my dual-core Turion system equipped with 1 GB of memory. Many things in both pieces of software have changed and/or moved from their locations in XP and Office 2003, and configuring the system the way I want it took a couple days of experimenting.

Some of the new features in Vista include stepped up security. The latest PC / Mac Commercial summs up the security pretty accurately.

One of the nice things I can point out right off is that I had NO driver problems after installing Windows Vista. I expected to at least have to go to the ATI website for some new video drivers, but Windows Update had that base covered already.

The biggest hassle to installing Vista was that the installer required me to remove a bunch of applications from my notebook (Like Nero Burning ROM) that are not Vista compatible. The installer would work for 10 minutes or so and then bail because incompatible software was found. I then had to remove the one program that Vista found and try again. The process repeated for each program that was found to be incompatible. The moral to the story is that if the Vista Upgrade Advisor says it won’t work, it won’t work. I also had to uninstall my Norton Internet Security and download a new, Vista compatible version from Symantec at no charge.

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For some time now Schrock Innovations has been working with 104.1 Pure Rock the Blaze to establish four streaming web cams in their radio studio. On Tuesday morning, the Blaze will hold the first Mayoral debate in their studios, and Schrock innovations is proud to provide the technology that will bring the debate to your computer screen.

While you listen to the candidates on 104.1 you can watch the debate live on the Schrock Innovations Blaze Cams. We have moved the camera page from Clear Channels servers to our local-Lincoln web server to ensure there is adequate bandwidth available for the event.

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Schrock Innovations is teaming up with Wellness One of Lincoln to take over management of the company’s existing computer infrastructure as well as establish a network in their new South Point location scheduled to open March 5th.

Schrock technicians will be linking the two locations together so they can maintain one database of clients and payables without establishing an expensive online system or a VPN. Wellness One will also be the debut client for our latest software development, SecureStore web-based backup software.
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Kevin Hennecke came to us about 8 months ago with a website that was designed previously by another company. His website, www.henneckehunts.com needed to be updated badly and the company that designed it had gone out of business. We captured his website for him and within a week we had it updated and working on our servers.

But suddenly Kevin started noticing that his competition was beginning to overtake him in the Google search results. Looking at the number of available seats on his Nebraska Spring Snow Goose Hunting tours he was beginning to realize something was not right. He checked into it and found that his site, which had been ranked #1 or #2 in Google, was now in 9th place.

Today Kevin came in to see what we could accomplish in three short weeks. In 4 weeks, everyone who is booking a Nebraska Goose Hunting Tour tour will have booked one already, so it would be too late for any Google results to help then. Kevin needed us to get him some website traffic that would convert into sales and he needed it fast.

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I came home last Tuesday at 8:30 after a long day of fixing PCs and closing website deals and prepared myself to switch gears and give my wife a baby break. As usual, she tells me “you will never believe what Jake did today!” turns out he said Da Da again. I had never actually heard him, but almost everyone else in our family had.

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Windows Vista will be released today at 12:00 AM (or would that be tomorrow?) and while there will actually be people waiting in line at the box stores for its release, Schrock Innovations recommends you let the pioneers take the arrows on this one and wait until March to install the new operating system on you computer.

HP is sponsoring a Microsoft launch party tonight at many of the local box stores (two location in Lincoln and three in Omaha) to celebrate the release of Microsoft’s new computer operating system, Windows Vista. In all sincerity, I do not expect any major problems with Vista. With that said, I DO expect some compatibility problems that should slow down any serious computer user. Windows Vista has a few new tricks in its bag that could create some headaches for the business or serious home user who installs the new O/S on a primary computer.
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Windstream has announced that they will be updating the minimum system requirements for a PC to connect to DSL or DSL lite. Now you must meet the following minimum system requirements to receive support on connection problems from Windstream:

• Windows 2000, XP, or Vista
• 300 MHz or Faster Processor
• 128 MB of RAM Memory
• 100 MB of Available Hard Disk Space

These requirements are still considered VERY low, especially when new PCs are coming with multiple processors and Gigabytes of memory these days. The more important thing to know about through this transition at Windstream is that they are releasing new connection management software that will be compatible with Windows Vista.
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Last Saturday we received a call in our Lincoln Service Center from a person who was not a Schrock customer. This person was standing at a big box store’s computer repair center waiting for the technicians to put her computer back together.

She was having problems getting a picture on her monitor, so she took it back to them for a repair since she had purchased the computer there a couple years ago. After waiting several hours for a diagnosis, the box store technician told her that her Norton Personal Firewall was blocking her monitor from displaying a picture.
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We have posted the latest Compute This radio program on the Schrock Innovations Website.

This week we spent the majority of the program discussing the new Microsoft operating system, Windows Vista. There were not too many callers this week, and we covered a lot of ground. As usual we tried to keep the techie language to a minimum and the English language to a maximum.