Technician Software ?

Diagnostic card

Anyone rate these? If so, which one as my nephew is into fixing PC's for his mates etc and might be a good present for his birthday!! :D
 
If you get copies of Dell disks (xp/vista/W7) they will install then activate with code on computer :) (xp prof needs to be sp2 for some reason or no activation)

Also....a wife who is good at book keeping and accounts...last thing you want to be doing.

Buy antivirus in bulk for discount then sell off for a nice profit but still saving the customer a good amout over full retail.

Multimeter (cheap one will do)

Soldering station (decent one with variable temp control) and solder/desolder wick/pump

Stash of hard drives to replace customers broken ones with as you will need them

Multi Laptop charger that has every fitting possible and voltage control

The list goes on :)

Data recovery software.. i use active file recovery and power data recovery. Neither free but they are good
Also get a copy of Backtrack 4 (its free) Its great for getting files of faulty hard drives that windows refuse to read from no matter what. Its not what it was designed for but its worked wonders for me recently

HDD regenerator is a great program for testing if a hard drive is faulty or not.
Some type of Windows password removal software is handy too as you always get a customer who leaves you with pc and forgets to tell you its pw protected.
 
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koolpc said:
Diagnostic card

Anyone rate these? If so, which one as my nephew is into fixing PC's for his mates etc and might be a good present for his birthday!! :D
Click to expand...

We bought one in our old place, it had terrible japanesenglish instructions and as a result we didn't really understand wtf it was trying to tell us, so we just went back to trial and error which is rarely wrong! :D
 
i do hope call outs and all i normal need is

malwarebytes
ccleaner
Microsoft security essentials (to replace whatever crud they already have, normally norton or Mcrappy)

after that i run msconfig and disable about 90% of the crap that is loading

normally the pc works fine after that

one tool you will need is a hard drive caddy, i find if a had drive is buggered or really messed up with a virus i stick it on my test laptop and then nuke it, its easier to clear viruses if the drive is a secondary one
 
i work in 2nd line Desktop support and been in the industry for 10 years now and tbh if you have any experience in this feild you should already know the answers to you your questions. everyone seems to be a IT expert nowadays but there is big difference from being and a bad techie and a good techie

Have you any experience in networking ? if you havent i would suggest you get some as most of your business will probaly come from that also Virus / Spyware removal is going to be big you only have to look on facebook to see that :) so get as much knowledge as you can on that

Tools i use on a regular basis

Hirens Boot CD got this on a bootable memory stick -This has all sorts of diagnosis software
2.5" and 3.5" HDD ide/SATA caddys for recovering data
ERD commander
Partition Magic
500GB External HDD with all sorts of drivers ,patches /service packs , software,reg key fixes and every Printer driver ever made :)
Virus / Spyware / Malware removers - Rkill , Malwarebytes , Hijack this, Super anti spyware , Removefake antivirus , Portable AV NOD32 and Kaspersky
 
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Sorry, I simply just skimmed through this thread... but THIS:

c4rm0 said:
tbh if you have any experience in this feild you should already know the answers to you your questions.
Click to expand...

Again, I don't mean to sound harsh... but if you don't have a decent amount of experience in this field you are WAY in over your head. I've been doing technical services for a few years (I'm okay, no pro but can typically handle 90% of the problems) and honestly, it can be such a pain in the ass. Software issues are usually jokes. Hardware ones, however....

Also, different tools work for different people; I recommend trying everything out, but you don't HAVE to use what's been said. For example, you use a PSU tester. As one of the other guys say, paperclip to me works just fine.

Are you doing door to door or is it a drop in service? Can be a huge difference in what you need. ie, if it was a drop in service I'd buy myself an air compressor... depending how the depth and degree of what you're doing, get a damn good soldering gun also.

If you're just starting off, I probably recommend just doing software for now.
 
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Instead of using the MSCONFIG, use Revou Uninstaller (Portable)
That is an absolute gem of a peice of software!!!
Possibly the most widely used piece of software by me and the lads at work (am in ICT engineer ;) ) to clean up pc's of crap!
 
Cheap PCI graphics card for the number of times you need to get into a PC with failed graphics or driver install. I use a radeon 7000.
In fact judicious buying on the auction sites can get you cheap ramsticks one of each type and CPU's (get the lowest performing for each socket). 99p auctions often don't go anywhere.

A netbook stuffed with recovery and tech software, USB and ethernet ports.
 
Hi,

I started my business a year ago after leaving my job doing basically the same thing for insurance companies.

Things I have lived and learned from, get a heads up from me:

- Even if a customer wants a job done quickly, do not ever say it will be done sooner than you think is reasonable. It may get you the job, but if it takes longer than you stated (i.e. waiting for part) then this customer is unlikely to choose you again, plus you'll get constant calls every day checking on the status.

- Get a good list of suppliers before you start out, preferably ones with next day delivery, this can often solve the above anyway. Especially if you're going to repair laptops as well.

- Don't undercharge. This is one major mistake I made in the beginning. Find out what your competition charges and charge the same or just over. Do not undercharge compared to your competition any more than £5 per hour. It gets you work in the beginning, but from people who want "something for nothing". Set your price and stick to it, you'll get a higher quality of client and makes you look more professional, not "the guy down the pub who can fix your pc for a score".

- Make sure you have at least one day a week where you can relax. Arrange part delivery times and callouts around this day. Trust me, you may feel desperate for work in the beginning but it's all about balance. It's not nice to constantly run around 7 days a week while others are relaxing or drinking.

- Set your personal voicemail message up.

- If you haven't already got liability insurance, I got mine from www.simplybusiness.co.uk and got £70 free adwords vouchers from them. You'll probably waste the £70 to start but it helps you learn how to use and manage adwords, make mistakes without £70 coming out of your own pocket.

- Sit back and wait for the calls to flood. Any customers you think are a bit of a pain while calling, or hassle you on price, do not accept the job. They are looking for something for nothing and I've learned the hard way.
Bringing back a PC I replaced a motherboard, backed up data, reinstalled and transfered the data back, only to be engaged in a "bartering" process is not fun.

- DISCLAIMERS, DISCLAIMERS, DISCLAIMERS. I cannot stress this enough, think up a list of terms, such as "once the customer has confirmed that order of a part should take place this serves as being committed to the repair." Customers calling once you've ordered a part for their machine saying they no longer want it done will lose you money, whether it's delivery cost to send the part back or inability to get a refund at all.

Any more help, just ask, those are just a few of the problems I have encountered which came from the top of my head.

Get a copy of UBCD and integrate Malwarebytes in to it. Look at a couple of tutorials on the internet. You have to do a full scan, the quick scan doesn't function correctly, though it allows you to use malwarebytes locked out of the operating system.

Regarding Combofix, I use it, it's a lot more efficient, but make sure you get a new copy of it every day as any old copies and it goes in to "limitation" mode when you try to run it. I learned the hard way in the beginning when it closed itself and deleted itself from my USB stick.
 
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Mostly DC Jack repairs. Unless you have another method you use for these repairs?

I'm looking at getting a Rework station at the moment, reballing would be an incredibly lucrative business to get good at, fun too.
 
Yep jack repairs are a common problem. Easy enough job once its stripped down....as long as its not the high temp stuff some makers use :(

Also you may need to solder case wires to extend them when the replacement motherboards connectors are too far back....right pain when it happens :(
 
Just want to say thanks to everyone for their advise, got pretty much everything up together now, except for liability insurance which will commence when I start trading.

Thanks again people, see you soon.

P.S - Sorry for late reply, have been moving house.
 
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