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

We have added another new computer help article to http://www.schrockinnovations.com. This article will show you how to increase your computer performance by setting your Windows XP based computer to run in performance mode.

Some of our customers have reported as much as a 25% performance gain by trading XP’s eye candy for horsepower! This one should be popular!

Check out this performance booster by visiting Set Windows XP to run in Performance Mode.

A company in China has created a browser called Maxthon that allows users to visit websites through their proxy server, and thereby avoid China’s aggressive censorship policies. The tiny Beijing company (also named Maxthon, has attracted millions of users in China for functionality that can circumvent government controls on information in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Baidu.com.

Here is an example. Do a search for the word Tienanmen at www.google.com (Here’s a link). The first results you see are about the Tienanmen Square Massacre where Chine ran over protesting students with tanks.

Now do the same search through the Google’s China search engine (Here’s a link). Note that the images of tanks are missing and the summaries of the top results have to do with vacationing and travel – not a protest.

Anyone who remembers the incident would also remember that to this day China officially declares that no one was ever run over with a tank in Tiananmen Square. It never happened as far as the Chinese government is concerned.

This is exactly what this small company is trying to circumvent. What is not entirely clear to me is why would a country who would run students over with tanks to silence them would allow a Beijing-based start up company to do this… Time will tell I suppose.

We have posted a new tutorial on the Schrock Innovations website in the DIY section. Last week a caller on the radio show asked how he could make a backup copy of his Outlook Express email messages. We successfully walked him through the steps on the air, and promised a step-by-step tutorial for everyone on the website.

As I have mention to many of you before, I like to under promise and over deliver. As promised, the tutorial on the Schrock Innovations website tells you how you can backup or transfer your Outlook Express email messages to a new computer. However it will also tell you how to transfer your address book, your email account settings, and your email sorting rules! You can transfer everything in your Outlook installation in one easy step-by-step process!

Check it out on the Schrock Website at http://www.schrockinnovations.com/backupoutlookexpress.php

Sorry about the outage this morning folks. I could just pull a “Baghdad Bob” and say outage? What outage? There was no outage…

The truth is we had to cooperate with an investigation that required our hosting company to pull some log files from our server. It required a few hours of down time, so for those of you who did not get your Schrock Blog fix, feel free to indulge now!

My uncle bought a new HP multifunction printer for my father and called me to come over and hook it up. I stopped by after work thinking it would only take a few minutes to get everything up and running. Boy was I wrong!

The printer is a photo quality printer that uses an HP 6-cartridge system to obtain high quality prints. I unpacked the system, started the software installing and followed the directions to get everything hooked up. When I powered the unit on for the first time, it informed me that one or more of the initialization cartridges were not installed correctly.

Defective Cartridges Described in Instructions?

After double check in the cartridges and making sure they were all positioned properly, the message persisted. My uncle had also purchased some replacement cartridges so I figured I would try those in place of the ones that were not working. After inserting the new cartridges, the machine told me I had to insert the original cartridges. Talk about frustrating!

So in a last ditch effort to find a solution on my own, I read the troubleshooting section of the instructions page. It said that if you receive the message that your cartridges are bad, you may have defective cartridges and that I should call HP to request replacements at the toll-free number below.

Disconnected Support Number

Frustrated, I called the number only to find it was disconnected! I then called toll-free directory assistance and asked for the H support number. They gave it to me and I called it only to get a recorded message saying, “Welcome to Technical Support. we are not affiliated with HP and do not provide warranty services for HP products. We will need a credit card number to continue.”

So I turned to the web. There was no mention of this problem in HP’s online support website, so I initiated a chat conversation with an HP tech. He had me power cycle the unit three times until he finally agreed to ship me new initialization cartridges.

Here is my question:

If you knew that the cartridges were bad, why not replace them before you ship? They knew enough to put a paragraph on the instructions about it with the wrong number listed. I guess sometimes even the big boys screw up…

Here is something interesting I found today on the web that should keep you amused for a while. The internet archive is a repository of web pages form the past.  In a way it acts like an internet time machine to show you what a website looked like years ago.
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I have teamed up with two other individuals to help launch a new anti-spyware website. It is located at http://www.databaseofspyware.com and it is designed to act as a global repository of all Spyware, Malware, and Adware infections. Eventually we will have manual removal instructions for all of the 7,500 infections that are currently housed on the site.

I found this story on an Australian news website. I have no idea if it is true, but either way it is funny.

Microsoft executives love telling stories against each other. Here’s one that platforms vice-president Jim Allchin told at a recent Windows Vista reviewers conference about chief executive Steve Ballmer.

It seems Steve was at a friend’s wedding reception when the bride’s father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look.

Allchin says Ballmer, the world’s 13th wealthiest man with a fortune of about $18 billion, spent almost two days trying to rid the PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware and severe fragmentation without success.

He lumped the thing back to Microsoft’s headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate.

If this story is true, it would be incredibly humorous. Although it would be a good test system for Microsoft’s new security service!

Maybe it is the fact that I am exposed to my programming staff many hours a day, or maybe it is because the FireFox browser is better than Internet Explorer… I am almost using Firefox as much as IE now.

If you have not downloaded Firefox, I recommend you do so and see what I am talking about. You can get Firefox free at http://www.getfirefox.com. While it takes a little longer initially to open FireFox, it does seem to surf a little more quickly.

For those of you who listen to my radio show, or know me personally, you know that I will always use IE. Why? Because that is what my customers use, and I need to know how to support it. When it comes right down to it, Firefox is probably a better browser, but sine IE comes reinstalled on all PCs, more people are always going to use it.

Maybe we should start installing Firefox on all of our new Modular PCs… Hmm….

I am proud to announce that the National Council on Economic Education has selected Schrock Innovations to perform a significant upgrade to their website, http://www.econedlink.org. The NCEE website allows teachers to look for or submit lesson plans for multiple grade levels designed to educate kids about economics.

Schrock Innovations placed a bid with the New York non-profit organization to rewrite their current ColdFusion website in PHP with a MySQL backend. We will also be developing a new lesson plan development tool that will allow NCEE employees, volunteers, and interns to design web pages that display lesson plans in a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) environment.

It was exciting to learn that the NCEE found us by doing a web search for programing companies. We always tell our clients that optimizing your website for search engines is a MUST, and this opportunity illustrates that point.

We were told that our proposal was one of the most detailed and well-designed they had seen. After a quick trip to New York and some reference checking, the NCEE web development job was ours! (Those of you who listen to Compute This may have noticed the pre-recorded shows with no callers – sorry about that)

This job provides Schrock Innovations a high-profile national client for our portfolio. In addition, its nice to know that our work will be viewed / used by over 100,000 unique visitors a day. Kudos to the Schrock development team and good luck!