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

With the cold and snow today, we had an active day of calls on my weekly radio program about computers and technology, Compute This. Our show airs every Saturday at 10:00 in the morning on KFOR 1240 AM in Lincoln NE.

You can listen to the recorded show from today, as well as last weeks program at http://www.schrockinnovations.com/radio.php. The shows are free to download, and the audio quality is superb. The shows are best enjoyed over a high-speed Internet connection.

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That’s right folks! It’s the second Tuesday of the month and that means it is time for another helping of updates for your Windows Operating System and Microsoft Office.

Eight fixes are planned for release today. If you have your automatic updating turned on, there is no need to take any action – your computer will download, install, and restart your PC for you in the middle of the night. (So don’t leave any unsaved work open on your PC tonight when you go to bed!)

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Tomorrow at 3:00 John Spatz will be holding a press conference in the Holiday Inn’s University Ballroom (Downtown Lincoln) to announce his candidacy for Lincoln’s District 4 City Council seat.

John needed a website that would help communicate his vision for Lincoln while at the same time providing information about himself and his campaign. Thankfully we had plenty of time to get the design of the pages complete well in advance of the event. However, content is always a bit trickier.

I am proud and amazed with the Schrock Innovations website design team who went from a mock up design to a completed website in a total of 8 hours. You can see John’s website at www.johnspatz.com. While there will be a few small additions in the coming days, for the most part it is complete and ready for action.
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Starting today, Schrock Innovations is hosting and maintaining the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s website. The Chamber was faced with a challenging situation. Due to internal reasons, they had to move their website to a different hosting company. However, they also wanted the new hosting company to integrate web-based email with their Treo phones and Blackberries. With the legislative session starting on Monday, emails were flying fast and furious.

Schrock Innovations successfully migrated the Chamber’s website to our new web server, and successfully implemented web-based email for the Chamber’s 10 staffers.

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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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