How To Fix The Windows Registry Hive Error

Most techs with a few years of experience under their belt have probably come across the Windows XP corrupted registry hive problem at some point in their career. When it happens, Windows wont start and will present one of these messages:

• Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM
• Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE
• Stop: c0000218 {Registry File Failure} The registry cannot load the hive (file): \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE or its log or alternate

In most cases, Safe mode wont work either. The uniform approach to fixing this is by getting into the Windows XP repair console and manually replacing the file with the copy that was created when the system was first installed. However, any software or drivers (depending on whether it was SOFTWARE or SYSTEM that failed) that was installed after that point may not work since the registries for them hadnt been installed back then.

Here is my method that I have been using to fix this. It reverts the registry to only a few days earlier rather than back to when Windows was first installed.

1. If you don’t have it already, download UBCD4Win using one of the mirrors here. If you do already have it on a CD, skip to step 3.

To run it, create an ISO and burn it to CD you can read the instructions here. I wont write the instructions here because the ones on the previous link are better and this article is more targeted at computer technicians and most of them already have this CD.

2. Once the CD has been created, goto the BIOS and make sure your CDRom is set as the first boot device. Start up the computer with UBCD4Win in the CDRom and you will have some boot options. Choose the “Launch The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows” option.

It will take a few minutes to load fully, but when it does you should see a Windows XP like interface like in the picture below:

3. In the UBCD4Win interface, goto Start > Programs > Registry Tools > Registry Restore Wizard.

4.The program will then ask you which Windows registry you want to repair. In most cases, it’ll be C:\Windows. Choose the copy of Windows you want to repair and press Next.

5. Choose “Fix the system registry to that of a previous state” and Press Next.

6. You should now see a list registry restore points. Choose one with a date a few days before the issue first occured.

7. Wait a few seconds for it to restore the registry. Press Finish and restart the computer. The issue should now be fixed. If not, it may be a sign of a greater issue like hard drive damage.

Most of us have heard of UBCD4Win which gives you a Windows like interface on a boot CD. UBCD4Win is great but what if you need to do some more low level work such as testing the RAM, doing a low level format or testing the condition of a hard drive? This is Where Ultimate Boot CD (dos version) comes in.

UBCD assembles over 100 PC hardware diagnosis tools into one bootable CD. It boots up very quickly (about 2 seconds on my machine) and provides a menu to many DOS based diagnostic tools tools such as:

• CPU Tests
• Memory Tests
• Peripherals Tools
• CPU Information
• System Information
• Benchmark Tools
• BIOS Tools
• Hard Disk Installation Tools
• Hard Disk Diagnostic Tools
• Hard Disk Device Management Tools
• Hard Disk Wiping Tools
• Hard Disk Cloning Tools
• Hard Disk Low-Level Editing Tools
• Partition Tools
• Boot Managers
• File Tools
• NTFS Tools
• Antivirus/Malware Tools
• Network Tools
• DOS Boot Disks
• Linux Boot Disks

A full list of the applications it contains can be found here. This application makes a great partner for UBCD4Win and is a must in any technicians kit.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html - 115mb

An Easy Way to Create a Virtual Machine

A Virtual machine software is an application that emulates real hardware. A software based test PC if you will. This allows me to install Windows XP as I normally would on a real PC, but within the virtual machine software. Basically, I could run a copy of Windows XP inside my main Windows XP install that I use day to day.

To create a virtual machine, we need to install a Virtual Machine Player. There is a great free one called “VM Ware Player” which you can download here (or here if you want to skip the survey stuff, but it may be an older version).

Once you have downloaded and installed the player we need to create a virtual machine environment. You can easily do this by visiting EasyVMX.com.

Once at the Easy VMX site, we need to fill in some options. For this example I am going to create a Windows Vista virtual machine that I can run within my Windows XP.

Step 1 - Virtual Machine Name
I am going to set my virtual machine name as “Vista”. You can call it whatever you want but for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to just call mine Vista.

Step 2 - Choose an Operating System
Now I need to choose what operating system I am going to install from the list. As you can see there are many different operating systems that you can install. In this case, I will choose the 32bit version of Vista.

Step 3 - Virtual Machine Memory Size

Now we need to choose the Virtual machines memory size. This is basically setting how much RAM your emulated hardware has. This setting will use up your real RAM so since my real machine has 2 gigs of RAM, I’m going to allocate 1 gig to my virtual machine.
Keep in mind, although this virtual machine is emulating hardware, the fake hardware must meet the system requirements of what you are installing. In this example, 1 gig should still be enough for Vista.

Step 4 - Virtual Machine Disk Size
Now we need to choose the virtual machine disk size. This is how big the emulated operating system’s hard drive will be. If I set this to 12 gig and I installed Vista, Vista will show a 12 gig harddrive in the “My Computer” area. As I said before, the emulated machine must meet the system requirements of what you are installing. Vista requires 7 gig or more so I am going to choose 12 gig which will be enough to install Vista and also give us a little breathing room. Remember, if you use 12gig of space in your virtual machine, it will use 12gig of space on your real machine.

Step 5 - Mount ISO (optional)
This part is optional. It allows you to make the virtual machine think you have a CD in the drive when it is really just an ISO. If you want to run an ISO, put the ISO file in the same location the files you are about to download are going to be and put in the files name like “VistaCD.iso”

If you don’t fill in this part, the Virtual Machine will use your real CD rom as a boot device to check for a bootable CD and if you have a real Vista CD in there, it’ll start the installation process.

Step 6 - Create Virtual Machine
Your setup should look something like this:

Once your done, click the “Create Virtual Machine” button and it’ll take you to the next page where there is a download link for your virtual machine. Save it somewhere you’ll remember and extract the file.

Step 7 - Launch Your Virtual Machine
Double click on the .VMX file and your virtual machine environment will launch. You can also open VMWare Player, go to Open and navigate to the VMX file. If you have a CD in your drive or if you specified an ISO file earlier it’ll try to launch off that. In this example, I’m using a physical Vista CD.

Step 8 - Installing an OS
If the Operating Systems CD is bootable, it should have been detected during bootup. If you are installing XP you’ll need to click on the VMWare screen to bring it to focus and press a button on the keyboard when it says “Press any key to boot from CD or DVD..” (or something similar). On my Vista install, I didn’t need to click anything.

It started up and begun the installation process. As you can see, the installer sees a 12 gig drive that I specified earlier so I click Next and let it go though the install process.

Finished!
Now we have a Vista virtual machine. That’s all there is to it.
If you like, make a copy of the virtual machine folder to keep as a clean version. That way, you can install viruses and all sorts of things and then when you are done, delete the virus ridden one and make a copy of the clean one.

Be sure to shut down the virtual machine OS properly because if you just close VMWare Player, it leaves a massive hibernation file on the hard drive.

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An Easy Way to Create a Virtual Machine

Repair Tool : Easus Partition Manager

Free for personal use and $31.96 for professional use, Easus Partition Manager is a great alternative to Symantecs “Partition Magic”. The main features of Easus Partition Manager are the ability to format, resize, delete, add, copy, set active and change drive letters. It can even be used as a Bart-PE plugin.

I tested in this on my virtual machine as I do with every repair tool of the week I recommend and was very pleased with the results. I loaded it up, it saw the virtual machines 4 gig drive and how much information was already used (just the OS). I slid the slider to make another partition as big as I could without destroying existing data, named the other partition and clicked apply. I asked me to reboot and during the Windows XP bootup screen it goes to work with creating the partitions.
There was no messing around while using this, it doesn’t destroy data, you don’t have to know a lot about formatting and partitions, it just works and its a nice free alternative to Partition Magic.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site - 7.93mb

More Information
Bart-PE Plugin Information

Repair Tool of the Week: Easus Partition Manager

TeraCopy Portable

Imagine this, you have a clients computer on your workshop bench that is backing up 30 gig of their data to your portable hard drive before a format. You copy and paste the files through Windows and go have lunch since it will take a while. You come back an hour later expecting the copy to be finished only to find it got a few minutes in until it said “Access Denied” to one of the files and then stopped the entire process. This is where TeraCopy comes in.

TeraCopy Portable is a portable, freeware file-copying utility that tries to copy a file several times and if it fails, it skips the file and continues. TeraCopy also copies files faster than the built in Windows copy system by “dynamically adjusting buffers to reduce seek time”. Thus, making your backup process faster and more reliable.

TeraCopy has some other great features such as the ability to pause and resume transfers, shell intergration and a interactive file list that shows the failed file transfers so you can fix them later.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site - 880kb

Capacitor Problems

the computer would not boot up into Windows. The system would go through the BIOS processes without a problem, show the Windows XP boot logo and then the screen would switch off.

If the display works fine out in BIOS but then switches off when the computer gets into Windows, this is obviously going to driver problem of some sort. So, I reboot into Safe Mode so I can do something about this driver problem and the screen switched off again when it got past the Windows XP bootup logo.

I figure that if I boot the system into VGA mode it should work and sure enough, it does. At this point I am suspecting that the video card driver has become corrupt or something so I download the latest video card drivers from the manufacturers official site, remove the old drivers and install the new ones. I rebooted the computer and the screen still switches off once it gets past the XP logo.

I am beginning to think that the clients screen may be faulty because it cant handle the higher resolutions. I go out to my car and bring in my old 15 inch LCD screen that I use for testing. I rebooted the computer again and the problem still exists even on my screen.

At this point I am running out of ideas of what this problem could be. I was sure it was a driver issue because the video card obviously works because it would work fine in BIOS. When a video card fails it either displays artifacts on the screen, locks up or just fails completely which wasn’t the case here. I take off the side of the case and take look at the video card anyway even though I still believe this is a driver issue.

This is what I found.

It seems those two caps had something to do with controlling the resolutions 800×600 and above. When the video card was displaying 640×480 out in BIOS I believe these two caps weren’t being used and therefor the video card would work fine.

When Windows got past the XP boot screen, it would switch to 800×600 or above, the information would go through these two damaged capacitors and no video would be passed to the screen which makes it switch off.

I replaced the video card with an identical one, powered up computer and it worked instantly. I didn’t even need to do anything with the drivers. I just goes to show you that the problem isn’t always what it seems

Repair Tool: ScanPST

Outlook is a fairly indepth program that stores a lot of data and it can occasionally become corrupted to the point where Outlook cannot be launched. Since many people use Outlook to organise their lives you can imagine how much they freak out when their information becomes corrupted.

This little tool called ScanPST has allowed me to save many stressed out clients in the past. It only does one thing but its a very important one, ScanPST will scan a Outlook data file (.pst) that you choose for corruptions and attempt to repair it.

If you have an Office Package that includes Outlook, you already have this application.

Goto Start > Search and search for “Scanpst.exe”. If you cannot find it that way, its most likely located in the following folders:

For Outlook XP and 2003:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\LocaleID

For Outlook 2007
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE12Now

(Assuming C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office is the location you installed office)

To find the Outlook data file to use it on, its usually located in the following folders:

For Windows XP or Server 2003:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

For Vista:
c:\users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook

Screenshots:

Downloads:
If you have Office that includes Outlook, you already have it.

Repair Tool: EnableDisable

EnableDisable is a small, freeware application designed to allow you to enable or disable Microsoft Office add-ins. This comes in handy when an addin is causing an Office product (like Outlook, Word or Access) to crash and you cannot get into the application to switch it off. Of course, you could always use the /safe switch for the product, find the add ins menu and disable it that way,. However, this way shows the installed addins for all of the Office products installed at once so this method is faster.
Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site - 566kb

Repair Tool: Video Memory Stress Test

Video Memory Stress Test is a small application that is free for home use (but paid for commercial use) and is designed to test the RAM on your video card. Similar to Memtest86+, it will read and write data to each part of the video cards RAM and log any errors found.
I used this application on a machine a few months ago that would get artifacts when playing World of Warcraft, but not during general use. I suspected the video card was dying so I ran this tool and it instantly came up with pages and pages of errors. I swapped the video card and everything was working again so it definitely did its job.

This application comes with both a Windows version and a bootable DOS based ISO which is handy if you cannot get into Windows because of suspected video card problems.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site - 644kb
Download from Majorgeeks - 644kb

Repair Tool Returnil Virtual System Personal

Returnil is an application that completely mirrors your current Windows installation and seamlessly virtualizes it. Just press the button to switch it on, do whatever the you want to the computer (install some viruses or something), reboot your computer and Windows will be restored back to the way it was.

This application would be fantastic to use on family computers where the kids don’t browse safely or on public computers that are used by any people.

Returnil is great for the consumer level because of its ease of use (just a “switch on” button) and mirrors the entire current operating system. I have used other virtualization applications like Sandboxie which is good, but that only virtualizes single applications. Virtualbox is another great piece of software but that only virtualizes a separate operating install and its also windowed. I found neither of these to be consumer-level ease-of-use like Returnnil is. Returnil is free for personal use and well worth recommending to clients.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Download.com - 2.56mb

More Information

My Onsite Technician CD Wallet

UBCD4Win - UBCD4Win is my preferred GUI repair environment because its Windows based and have already been loaded with many repair applications. Of course, you can use a Linux LiveCD flavor if that is more your style.

Ultimate Boot CD (dos version) - Ultimate Boot CD is a DOS based menu that allows you to do low level work to a system like testing the RAM for errors, doing a low level format or testing the condition of a hard drive. It contains the DOS versions of some commonly used applications such as Aida, Memtest86+, Dariks Boot and Nuke and more.

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor - Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is a freeware utility that allows you to change or blank the password of any user that has a valid account on a local NT/2000/XP/2003/Server 2008/Vista 32 & 64bit system.

Offline Update - Offline Update is a freeware tool that downloads all of the existing patches for the operating system you specify (choice of Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003) and creates an ISO file, for which you can later burn to a CD or DVD.

The DriverPacks.net CDs - The DriverPacks.net project is an open source project. The goal is to simplify the creation of a “uniform” Windows installation CD, i.e. an installation CD that works on every piece of hardware, without having to go look for other drivers after the installation.

Windows Installer CDs
A copy of:

• Windows 98 SE
• Windows 2000 Workstation/Small Business
• Windows XP Home OEM/Retail/Genuine Advantage
• Windows XP Professional OEM/Retail/VLK 32bit/64bit
• Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit / 64bit (contains all Vista versions)
• Microsoft Office 2000, XP, 2003, 2007

How do I get all of these I hear you say? I personally obtained most of mine as I bought the OSes for my own personal computers over the last 7 years. Some technicians create a copy of their clients CDs as they come in (without the CDkey of course since that would be piracy). Another option is to subscribe to the Microsoft Action Pack which contains most of Microsofts Software. However, this only contains their current software and not older versions so you couldn’t get Windows 98 and 2000. I have also heard some technicians even suggest downloading the ISOs from bittorrent sites but not using the CD Key. However, this is not recommended as the internet version may be infected with all sorts of hidden nasties.

A copy of your USB Repair Tool Kit on CD - In some cases, the USB ports don’t work on a clients machine or you may not want to plug in your USB drive into a infected machine as your drive may also become infected. This is where having a copy of your USB repair tool kit on a CD is handy.

Driver Disks for Your Own Devices - I rarely ever have to use this driver disk for the devices I take onsite like my USB drive, USB DVD burner, USB network card & USB soundcard as Windows XP and above will automatically detect these. However, sometimes if I have to work on Windows 98 or a damaged version of a later operating system, it can come in handy if they are not being detected.

Windows Service Packs Standalone and .NET Installers
You can choose to keep this on your USB drive as well, but its nice to have them on a CD as well.

• Windows XP Service Pack 3
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 - 32bit
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 - 64bit
• .NET Framework 2.0
• .NET Framework 3.0
• .NET Framework 3.5

Installers for Commonly Used Applications - Another one you can also keep on a USB drive. Its a good idea to have commonly used installers on a CD like FoxIT Reader, nVidias Forceware Drivers, Skype, Thunderbird, iTunes etc..

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is a freeware utility that allows you to change or blank the password of any user that has a valid account on a local NT/2000/XP/2003/Server 2008/Vista 32 & 64bit system. You do not need to know the old password to set a new one which makes this ideal for use with clients who have forgotten their password or were locked out by someone else. Unlocking locked or disabled accounts is also supported.

This tool comes in the form as a bootable CD ISO or Floppy disk ISO but can also be made to boot from a USB drive. The application is Linux based and it asks you questions about which drive and Windows install you would like to work with. Most questions can be answered just by pressing Enter since the best option is already chosen.

Warning: If used on user accounts that make use of EFS encrypted files, all encrypted files will become unreadable unless you remember the old password again. This is a serious technician tool and shouldn’t be used by people who don’t know what they are doing.

BlueScreenView - Repair Tool

BlueScreenView is a small, freeware and portable application that scans all of the minidump files that are created when Windows experiences a “Blue Screen of Death”. It will display the information about all the crashes in one table with the minidump filename, the time and date of the crash, basic information about the crash (as in the BSOD message) and the driver or module that possibly caused the crash.

The main benefit of using BlueScreenView over other minidump reading applications is that it does not require the Microsoft debugging tools (which are 16 - 225mb in itself) which makes this application small, quick and portable. This tool is definitely worth having in your kit to track down the cause of BSOD’s.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site - 48kb

PCIDatabase.com

After you do a clean install of Windows, you go to the Device Manager and discover the dreaded question mark next to an “Unknown Device”. You could just download the driver for this device, but you don’t know what it is! This is where PCIDatabase.com comes in handy.
PCIDatabase.com is website to help you identify unknown PCI devices without using any special software.

To find out what a PCI Device is, go to Device Manager, right click on the Unknown Device and choose Properties.
Go to the “Details” Tab and choose “Hardware ID’s” from the dropdown box. You should see something like this.

You will want to get the ID starting with VEN_ and the ID starting with DEV_. In this case the Vendor ID is 11AB and the Device ID is 4364.

For this example I am just going to use the Device ID and go to PCIDatabase.com. Enter the Device ID into the “Device Search” text box and press search.

If it knows the device, it’ll come up with something like this:

Instant Housecall Review

In this article I will be reviewing some remote support software called “Instant Housecall”. Instant Housecall aims to be a complete support package for computer techs who provide remote support.

Once this has all been setup, you can either used a support page created by Instant Housecall that you can send your customer with a URL like “ABCTech.instanthousecall.com” or you can set up a direct download link from your current website so they never see the Instant Housecall domain. This is what my test page looks like:

I would direct my client to this page, they press “Download Now” and the client-side support software would install. Something worth pointing out is that Instant Housecall has gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that it is as easy as possible for the clients to set up the client-side software. There are no pin codes that they have to enter or read out to you (unlike Crossloop or LogMeIn Rescue), the client doesn’t have the usual three “Open, Save and Cancel” options when downloading the software, it only has Run and Cancel. Basically, the less opportunities for a client to click the wrong thing the better and Instant Housecall has gone to extremes to prevent this which is great.

Instant Housecall also works in Safe Mode (with networking enabled) and with Vistas UAC so you dont have to tell the client to switch UAC off or “Run as Administrator” since you can press “Allow” button yourself.

There are two versions of the client-side support software, one is what they call the “Hotline” which is an executable installer and the other is a temporary applet. The advantage of having both is that the applet can be run on locked down or administrator restricted machine and the “Hotline” application has more custom branding options with the ability to let the client allow unattended remote access to their computer.

To make sure there are no connectivity issues, the system tries to make peer-to-peer connections where possible. If it cant, the system will use Instant Housecalls secured server.

For this review, I loaded up a virtual machine, visited my support page and downloaded my support program. Once it was installed it asked me for a little bit of information such as my name, phone number and a reason for the support call (this is for the technicians records but this can be switched off if you dont like it). I also had the option to choose different specialists if I had a preference and there was more than one working for me.

Once I filled out the details on the client-side, the Specialist software on my main computer popped up with this message:

I accepted the call and the remote control software started. Once I had looked around in the remote control window, I noticed some interesting features such as File Transfer, IM Chat, Record Session Video, Take Screenshot, Send Ctrl-Alt-Del to remote computer, Reconnect after Reboot, Accept Payment and Blank Remote Monitor. There is also a little box informing the client that the computer is being controlled by me which moves around the screen if you put the mouse which is handy if its covering something you need access to.

Here is a picture of the remote control software from the technicians end:

If the client allowed me remote access or I was watching over many machines inside my corporation, I would see something like this that allows me to choose which unattended computer I would like to log into.

Now, lets talk about getting paid for our hard work. Once I was finished testing I pressed “Accept Payment” menu option which took me a little while to find until I read the manual. The “Accept Payment” drop down not being in an obvious location is one of my very few gripes about this software, otherwise I really like it. The other gripe is that the client presses F10 to chat to you and F11 to disconnect you. I can foresee my clients accidentally disconnecting me since F10 and F11 are right next to each other. Buttons like F9 and F12 or something similar with a few buffer keys in between would probably have been a little better.

Anyway, once the Accept Payment option was pressed the client is presented with this:

Once they press OK they are taken to a page where they can pay for your services. In this example, I used Paypal but apparently it can work with just about any shopping cart. Of course, you can also do this at the start of the session before any work is done if you are less trusting of the end user.

Once everything has been paid for and you are finished with the client, your reports area is updated displaying how much you earned per session/client including any notes made during the repair.

If a client activates the Instant Housecall on software on their end and you are not at the computer to answer it or you have the Specialist application closed, Instant Housecall can SMS you notifications such as missed calls, calls in queue and messages left for you by your customers (Professional version only). I can see this being really useful for one man businesses who cant sit at a computer all day in case a Instant Housecall comes through.

Last but not least, to test the transfer speeds I used Instant Housecall to remote into friends computer who believed they were infected with a trojan. The speeds were on par with other big names in remote support which was good considering my friend was using a wireless connection on their end. Also, during the 40 minutes or so I was connected to their computer, it didnt disconnect once which was great.

So how much does it cost? Instant Housecall has different pricing for 3 different versions depending on your needs:

• The Free Edition which allows you unlimited sessions but only 3 customers.
• The Express Edition costs $49 USD per month or a lifetime license of $899 which allows you unlimited sessions and unlimited customers.
• The Professional Edition (the version I reviewed) is similar to the Express Edition but for $89 USD per month or $1699 lifetime it allows you to help up to 10 people at once (Express only allows 1 at a time), allows you to brand the software with your own logos, alerts you via pager or SMS if you miss a clients support call, the ability to record screen sessions, remotely access unattended workstations and more.

Instant Housecall is much cheaper than other remote support software like LogMeIn Rescue per month/year and LogMeIn Rescue doesn’t even have a lifetime option. If you used the professional edition of Instant Housecall over LogMeIn Rescue for two years you are already ahead by $677 and will remain ahead since you don’t have to pay an extra $1188 USD per year if you went with LogMeIn Rescue.

Instant Housecall is a complete package for support technicians managing branding, payments and reporting. They also make things as easy as possible for the customers to get help with little opportunity for them to click the wrong button which is obviously a good thing.

It is definitely worth giving the 15 day trial a shot yourself which you can do using the following download link: http://www.instanthousecall.com/tn/SetupSpecialistSign-in.exe

RootRepeal - Repair Tool

RootRepeal is a small, portable and freeware application that is designed to uncover rootkits. This tool has been picking up popularity with security groups like Systernals. This is a tool for advanced users only who know what the normal Windows drivers, processes and services are. If you don’t know what you are doing you can easily render a computer unbootable.

RootRepeal has the following features:

• The ability to scan and display all currently loaded drivers and tell you whether they are hidden and whether the drivers file is visible on disk.
• Scans for hidden, locked or falsified files on the system
• Scans and displays the currently running processes (similar to Process Explorer) but shows if the process is hidden or locked.
• Scans the SSDT (system service descriptor table) to see if any services are hooked.
• Scans for Stealth objects which looks for rootkit symptoms in general.
• Scans for Hidden services and displays them.

Once you have found something malicious, you can right click on the driver/file/service and either copy, wipe or force delete it.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Geeks to Go - 93kb

Computer Hardware Chart

Images:
You can also get these graphics printed as a poster to hang in your workshop over at DeviantArt via this link.

Low Resolution Web Version (2mb)

Ultra High Resolution Version (24mb)

Computer Hardware Chart

Xpy - Repair Tool

Xpy is a small, portable and freeware registry tweaker with an emphasis on tweaking privacy and security settings. It has the ability to disable Windows communicating with Microsoft (WGA, crash reports, usage tracking, automatic updates etc..), disable services which are not used in most cases, remove Windows Messenger, tweak Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player and many other settings you would expect in a registry tweaker.

This application comes with a few nice features such as the ability to save and load profiles so you can apply the same tweak setup to multiple computers without having to re-select all the tweaks you wanted to do. The application will also make a Windows Restore Point before it makes any changes in-case something doesn’t go well.

Xpy works on Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003. There is also a Vista/Server 2008/Win7 version called Vispa.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site - Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 - 93kb

Ninite.com – Repair Tool

Reloading Windows and installing various applications is something that Computer Technicians do all the time. While we can streamline our Windows installs using something like nLite, there isnt really a good way to automate the installation of multiple applications. Sure, some technicians make use of .BAT files or a scripting language like AutoIT but the code is often too difficult for some Technicians. This is where Ninite comes in.

Ninite.com (formerly Volery) is a simple tool for Windows that will automatically download all the latest versions of the software you choose from its directory, then install them silently (as in, you shouldn’t see the installers or asked any questions). Some of the software you will see in their directory is Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, Foxit Reader, Avast, AVG, Flash Plugin, CCleaner, 7zip and much more. This program will not choose not to install the spammy toolbars/search pages that comes with certain software like Foxit Reader.

Screenshots:

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Windows 7 System Recovery Discs – Repair Tool   Windows 7 is just about to be released (October 22) and you are going to start seeing it on clients machines when their new brand name laptop or desktop comes with it pre-installed. The problem with many brand name laptop and desktops is they often dont come with the Windows 7 disc. This Windows 7 System Recovery Disc can be used to access the system recovery menu, giving you options such as System Restore, Complete PC Backup, Automated System Repair and Command-line Prompt. However, you cannot use this disc to re-install Windows. If you already have access to a working copy of Windows 7, you dont need to download this because you can create this disk by going to the run dialog and type: recdisc Screenshots: Downloads: Download from Neosmart.net – 32-bit (x86) Edition Torrent – 146mb Download from Neosmart.net – 64-bit (x64) Edition Torrent – 145mb Kill All Running Apps .BAT – Repair Tool The title pretty much says it all. This .BAT file will kill all currently running apps on a system with the exception of a few locked Windows processes and some antivirus products. This comes in handy when you are working on a system that has too many processes running and thus slowing it down; often to the point where its difficult to do any work on it. Being a BAT file, this script is obviously highly customizable. It works on a “if the process is not in this list, then kill it” system; so you can add processes to the list that you do not to be killed such as the menu for your USB drive applications or Firefox. This works on XP and Vista. For information on how to add processes to it, check out the official page. Screenshots: Downloads: Download from Official Site – 4kb Damaged docx2txt And Corrupt Excel xlsx2csv – Repair Tool Damaged docx2txt is a freeware recovery tool designed to recover text from corrupt Word 2007 XLSX files. Word 2007 files are actually a collection of zipped XML files and the XML format is somewhat unforgiving of data corruption. This application unzips the partially corrupted XML files and tries to read what it can, not caring about malformed XML. This tool pretty much just dumps the text it finds in the XML file to text. Corrupt Excel xlsx2csv is similar to the above except it is designed to recover the content of corrupt Excel XLSX files. Again, XSLX files are based on XML files which is unforgiving to data corruption. This application has the ability to maintain the cell formatting and the cells content; including seperate workbooks in a single XLSX file. You can copy and paste the content out of the application or export the entire spreadsheet to CSV. Both of these applications were originally Perl scripts but have since had a GUI made for them (you will see a command window though). These applications are “mostly portable” as it doesnt need to be installed but requires .NET version 2. Screenshots: Damaged docx2txt Corrupt Excel xlsx2csv Downloads: Damaged docx2txt: Download from Official Site – 3.1mb Corrupt Excel xlsx2csv: Download from Official Site – 3.5mb XPQuickFix – Repair Tool XPQuickFix is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to quickly fix any restrictions and other errors that are often caused by viruses. XPQuickFix can correct 25 common Windows XP problems such as enable the Task Manager, enable Registry Editor, fix a CD autoplay and more. Here is the complete list of the fixes: Enable Task Manager Enable Registry Editor Stop My Documents open at startup Enable Folder Options Restore missing Run dialog box Enable Command Prompt Restore My Computer (Computer) properties Restore Device Manager Fix delay in opening Explorer Restore grayed Explorer and Taskbar toolbars Restore My Documents properties Remove OEM splash and wallpaper Restore My Network Places to Desktop Enable Recovery Console Restore grayed file associations Fix right-click error Fix slow network file/shared/remote Restore Network icon to system tray Fix slow hotkeys Fix CD/DVD drive is missing or not recognized Fix CD autoplay Restore “Send To” context menu item Restore the native ZIP file integration Fix error 1606 couldn’t access network location Error when trying to access Add or Remove/ Program and Features program Screenshots: Downloads: Download from Softpedia – 528kb AppRemover – Repair Tool AppRemover is a small, free and portable utility designed to be a single removal tool for a huge list of security products. It can remove products made by Avast!, AVG, Avira, BullGuard, CA, ClamWin, ESET, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Lavasoft, McAfee, Microsoft, Norman, Panda, Sophos, Symantec, TrendMicro, TrustPort, Webroot and many more. Screenshots: Downloads: Download from Official Site – 3.17mb Zone Alarm Removal Tool – Repair Tool Zone Alarm is a well known internet security package and most of the time it works fairly well. However, because this application has to sink its hooks deep into a Windows to protect the operating system, it can cause serious problems when the application does not uninstall correctly. It seems, based off Zone Alarms official forums that there are a lot of people having trouble removing Zone Alarm and this is where the Zone Alarm Removal Tool comes in. Its a small, portable and freeware and its probably a good idea to have on your USB drive since you probably wont be able to connect to the internet to download it if you encounter these problems with Zone Alarm. Download from Official Site – 3.3mb Clonezilla – Repair Tool Clonezilla is a free, open source disk imaging tool that is loaded with features. While it is a little rough around the edges visually, it is very capable. It supports over a half dozen file systems covering Windows, Linux and Macintosh based computers. If Clonezilla does not support the file system, you can still image the hard drive by doing a sector-by-sector copy. Clonezilla can be run from a Live CD, USB drives or a network drive and has the ability to either create a single image file, or do a direct copy from one hard drive to another. Screenshots: Downloads: Download from Sourceforge – 103mb Fabs AutoBackup 3 – Repair Tool Fabs AutoBackup is a small, portable application that allows you to pick and choose what you (or your client) want to back up with simple check boxes. The program does the rest. After the format, you can also use AutoBackup to restore all the files back to where they should be. We have actually covered Fabs AutoBackup about a year ago but it is now Windows Vista and Windows 7 Compatible and had added quite a few new features making it worth mentioning again. For a list of what AutoBackup supports backing up and restoring, read on. Desktop Files Quick Launch Shortcuts My Documents My Pictures My Music My Videos Desktop Wallpaper Internet Explorer Favorites Mozilla Firefox Profiles Outlook Express Files Outlook Data Files Outlooks .nk2 file Windows Live Mail Windows Address Book (.wab) Mozilla Thunderbird Profiles Shared Documents Windows Fonts MS Office Activation File Windows Calendar Modem Settings User Defined Additional Files and Folders Screenshots: Downloads: Download from Official Site – 697kb Game Key Revealer Currently Supported Games: Game Key Revealer is a small, portable, freeware application designed to list the license/cd keys for thegames currently installed on a computer. To use, just click the “Find Games” button and it will list the license keys. You then have an option to save these keys to a text file, a word document or print it directly to from the application to your printer. This is a handy tool to run before a format because clients tend to lose the original CD covers, boxes or manuals that the license keys came on. Read on to see a full list of the games it can reveal license keys for. 10tacle Studios - GT Legends - GTR 2 Activision - Call of Duty (all series) - Star Trek: Starfleet Command III - Star Trek: Elite Force II - Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 ATARI - Act of War (all series) - Terminator 3: War of the Machines - And some other games AxySoft - Almost all games Crytek - Crysis - Crysis Warhead - FarCry Electronic Arts - Battlefield 1942 (all series) - Battlefield 2 (all series) - Battlefield 2142 (all series) - Black & White (all series) - Black & White 2 (all series) - Command and Conquer (all series) - Command and Conquer 3 (all series) - Cricket (all series) - F1 (all series) - FIFA (all series) - FIFA Manager (all series) - FIFA World Cup (all series) - Fussball Manager (all series) - Harry Potter (all series) - Madden NFL (all series) - Medal of Honor (all series) - MVP Baseball (all series) - Nascar (all series) - NBA Live (all series) - Need for Speed (all series) - NHL (all series) - Rugby (all series) - Shogun: Total War (all series) - SimCity (all series) - The Lord of the Rings (all series) - The Sims (all series) - The Sims 2 (all series) - Tiger Woods PGA TOUR (all series) - Total Club Manager (all series) - UEFA Champions League (all series) - UEFA Euro (all series) - And all other games Epic Games - Unreal Tournament (all series) Eugen Systems - Act of War (all series) - The Gladiators Funatics Development - The Settlers II - 10th Anniversary - Zanzarah GameHouse - Almost all games Iron Lore - Titan Quest (all series) JoWooD - Industry Giant 2 - The Nations - And some other games KONAMI - Pro Evolution Soccer (all series) - Winning Eleven (all series) Lionhead Studios - The Movies - And some other games LucasArts - Star Wars Battlefront (all series) - Star Wars Empire at War (all series) - Star Wars Republic Commando Oberon Media - Almost all games Phenomic - Spell Force (all series) Pi Eye Games - Almost all games PopCap Games - Almost all games SEGA - Medieval II: Total War - Rome: Total War Sierra/Valve - Caesar (all series) - Counter-Strike - Gunman Chronicles - Half-Life - TimeShift - World In Conflict - And some other games Techland - Call of Juarez - Chrome - GTI Racing - Xpand Rally (all series) THQ - Company of Heroes - Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts - Dawn of War (all series) - Forged Alliance - Frontlines: Fuel of War - MotoGP 2007 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl - Supreme Commander - Zanzarah Ubisoft - FarCry - Peter Jackson’s King Kong - Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones - Rainbow Six III RavenShield - Silent Hunter III - Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow - The Settlers II - 10th Anniversary - And some other games And more Screenshots: Downloads: Download from Official Site - 84kb Privilege Guard A product has been released which lets applications run properly when a user is running under the ‘least user privilege’ conditions. The product is called Privilege Guard which was developed by a UK-based startup company. “It creates a token based on the user’s token, but with administrator rights,” said Mark Austin who is the Avecto chief technology officer. “We’re trying to keep it simple at first,” he added in response to the issue that they are planning to integrate it with a software called Active Directory. This software is developed for Windows XP, Vista, as well as Windows Server 2003 and 2008. It costs £20. Source: Vnunet

Smart UAC Replacement

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site - 3.9mb

NetSetMan

NetSetMan is a small freeware tool designed to allow you to change your computers network settings quickly and easily. Lets say you take a laptop onsite for network related jobs but at home you have a special setup. Then you go onsite and have to keep changing it to “Obtain Automatically” so it works on the clients network. Once you return home, you have to set it all back to the way it was.

This is where NetSetMan comes in, it allows you to make network setting profiles which you can activate based on your location. For example, you may have one setup for your home, one for work and one for when you are on a public wireless access point.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Snapfiles - 1.3mb

Hitman Pro 2

Hitman Pro is a freeware piece of software that controls both an inbuilt antivirus and a handful of other popular antivirus and anti-malware products such as Spybot, Ad-Aware, NOD32 etc..
After installing Hitman Pro and running it, it downloads the latest versions of various antivirus and anti-malware products, installs them, updates them to the latest definitions and starts scanning. Its the ultimate set-and-forget tool for complete security scanning. However, due to the time it takes to scan with all the different antimalware packages and the need for a broadband connection to download all the updates, its recommend that you use this application in your workshop only.

Hitman Pro can use the following software to scan for viruses and malware

• Prevx CSI Free
• Trend Micro CWShredder
• Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE
• Spybot - Search and Destroy
• Webroot Spy Sweeper
• Ewido AntiSpyware Micro
• PC Tools Spyware Doctor
• Sunbelt CounterSpy
• NOD32 Antivirus
• Trend Micro Sysclean
• McAfee VirusScan

It also has a few other interesting options such as the ability to lower the access that certain programs (IE, Outlook, Firefox, MSN Messenger) have to your operating system and thus helps protect your computer.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Snapfiles - 3.82mb

SUMo

As most computer technicians should know, computer security isnt just about having up to date antivirus and anti-malware software. It is also about having the users software up to date as well.

Windows Updates is obviously one of the most important ones but many technicians forget about third party software like Firefox, MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo etc.. and unfortunately there isnt really a good way to check the versions of third party software other than opening each one and viewing the about information. This is where SUMo comes in. SUMo (Software Updates Monitor) is a small, freeware application designed to scan a system for installed software, check its version and let you know whether there is an update for it. If there is, it shows you a handful of places where you can download the most recent version.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site - 1.24mb

OpenedFilesView

We’ve all had it happen before. We go to delete some file and it cant be deleted because its currently in use. That’s easy enough to fix. All you have to do is fire up some sort of process manager like Process Explorer and kill the process, right?

Well, often the file that’s said to be currently in use isn’t a running .EXE in file so it cant be killed by a process manager. It might be a .DAT, .DLL or a .TMP file and its hard to tell whats running it.

This is where OpenedFilesView comes in. Its a freeware, portable application that shows you all the currently open files and what process opened them. The application also allows you to kill any of the currently open files listed so you can delete or move it.

This is definitely a handy tool to have when removing viruses that are running .DLL’s’s that are difficult to delete.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site - 44.5kb

More Information

AVG Remover

Why not just uninstall it via the Add/Remove Programs you might say? Because sometimes the uninstaller doesnt completely remove everything. If you try to install a new version of AVG or some other antivirus, you cant because it believes that the old AVG is still installed. This fixes that by running a script that removes all the registry keys that AVG left behind.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site (32bit version) - 677.3kb
Download from Official Site (64bit version) - 1.2mb

WirelessNetView

WirelessNetView (not to be confused with WirelessKeyView) is a very small, free and portable wireless network scanner. The application is very simple and doesn’t have graphing abilities like Netstumbler, but other than that it gives you all the wireless information you need. The main benefit that WirelessNetView has over most other wireless network scanners is that its portable (as mentioned before) and works on XP and Vista.

Other popular wireless network scanners such as Netstumbler is not portable and doesnt work on Vista.
Vistumbler is nice, but isn’t portable and doesn’t run on XP.
Issider works on XP and Vista, isn’t portable and requires .NET to run.

This makes WirelessNetView the best wireless scanner to carry on your USB drive as its portable and works on XP and Vista.

WirelessNetView can show the following information:
SSID, Last Signal Quality, Average Signal Quality, Detection Counter, Authentication Algorithm, Cipher Algorithm, MAC Address, RSSI, Channel Frequency, Channel Number, and more.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site - 40kb

ShellExView

ShellExView is another great offering from Nirsoft. ShellExView is a small, freeware and portable application designed to allow you to customise and clean up your right-click shell menu. You can edit the right-click context menu from the Windows Explorer menu (like “Scan for Viruses” or “Send to 7zip” menus) or edit Internet Explorer-specific menus.

This is especially useful for when a shell menu object is causing a system to lag, crash or it is just becoming too cluttered. When using the application, there will be a lot of entries that you have probably never seen before. To get an idea of where that particular entry appears on your sytem, scroll right and there is a column for My Computer, Desktop, Control Panel, My Network Places, Entire Network and Remote Computer. Any “Yes” entries under the Desktop column will appear when you right click on the desktop for example.

Using the green and red buttons you can either enable or disable any of the entries or if you goto the File menu, you can delete some of them completely. This is recommended for advanced users only.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site (Portable, Zip File, 32bit version) - 49kb
Download from Official Site (Portable, Zip File, 64bit version) - 69kb
Download from Official Site (32bit Installer) - 86kb

il PassView

You format a clients computer, put their files back to the original locations including the email clients database. You fill out their email settings as much as you can but realise you don’t have their email password. You call the client and guess what? They don’t know it either. Time to spend 30 minutes talking to their ISP for a password reset. This is where Mail PassView comes in.

Mail PassView is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to reveal the password and other account details which you should run before you format the machine. Mail PassView can get password and account details for the following email clients:

• Outlook Express
• Microsoft Outlook 2000 (POP3 and SMTP Accounts only)
• Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003/2007 (POP3, IMAP, HTTP and SMTP Accounts)
• Windows Mail
• Windows Live Mail
• IncrediMail
• Eudora
• Netscape 6.x/7.x (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
• Group Mail Free
• Yahoo! Mail - If the password is saved in Yahoo! Messenger application.
• Hotmail/MSN mail - If the password is saved in MSN/Windows/Live Messenger application.
• Gmail - If the password is saved by Gmail Notifier application, Google Desktop, or by Google Talk.

Screenshots:

Note: Due to the hacking potential of this tool (exposing email passwords), certain antivirus software detect this utility as a Trojan/Virus. This is a false positive and the file is clean. Its like a police man catching a locksmith with lock-picking tools and saying they are “burglar tools”. In the hands of a locksmith it is an essential item for his work. When I ran this, Kaspersky Antivirus detected the installer as malicious, but not the portable version.

The makers of this, Nirsoft, are highly trusted software makers and they even say on their own page that this is a false positive.

Downloads:
Download from Official Site (Portable Zip File) - 51kb
Download from Official Site (Installer) - 90kb

il PassView

You format a clients computer, put their files back to the original locations including the email clients database. You fill out their email settings as much as you can but realise you don’t have their email password. You call the client and guess what? They don’t know it either. Time to spend 30 minutes talking to their ISP for a password reset. This is where Mail PassView comes in.

Mail PassView is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to reveal the password and other account details which you should run before you format the machine. Mail PassView can get password and account details for the following email clients:

• Outlook Express
• Microsoft Outlook 2000 (POP3 and SMTP Accounts only)
• Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003/2007 (POP3, IMAP, HTTP and SMTP Accounts)
• Windows Mail
• Windows Live Mail
• IncrediMail
• Eudora
• Netscape 6.x/7.x (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
• Group Mail Free
• Yahoo! Mail - If the password is saved in Yahoo! Messenger application.
• Hotmail/MSN mail - If the password is saved in MSN/Windows/Live Messenger application.
• Gmail - If the password is saved by Gmail Notifier application, Google Desktop, or by Google Talk.

Screenshots:

Note: Due to the hacking potential of this tool (exposing email passwords), certain antivirus software detect this utility as a Trojan/Virus. This is a false positive and the file is clean. Its like a police man catching a locksmith with lock-picking tools and saying they are “burglar tools”. In the hands of a locksmith it is an essential item for his work. When I ran this, Kaspersky Antivirus detected the installer as malicious, but not the portable version.

The makers of this, Nirsoft, are highly trusted software makers and they even say on their own page that this is a false positive.

Downloads:
Download from Official Site (Portable Zip File) - 51kb
Download from Official Site (Installer) - 90kb

Microsoft released a USB/DVD download tool which can create a bootable USB stick from the installation DVD of Windows 7.

Customizing Windows 7

Tech Radar has posted an article about various tips and tricks that users can do in Windows 7. The methods include editing registry and text files, and working with images.

One of the tips is about the operating system’s (OS) interface. This can be customized by a software called Logon Changer or users can manually do the work by editing the registry and placing an image in a system folder.

Another tip is that a user can make the OS show empty drives by clearing the ‘Hide empty drives in the Computer folder’ box under Tools – Folder Options – View menu.

Western Digital’s Hard Drive Capacities

A new hard drive format is now being used by Western Digital (WD).

There are three ways to increase capacity and WD chose to increase the bit density of a hard drive. The other two ways are increase the number of tracks per inch and increase the number of surfaces.

The new format, called Advanced Format, removes Sync/DAM blocks and increases data integrity. The only model that is using Advanced Format is WD’s Caviar Green.

Advanced Format is not optimized for Windows XP or older operating systems according to the article at Computerworld.

ei.cfg Removal Utility (Windows 7 Universal CD) – 

One of the biggest frustrations when installing Windows XP was making sure you had the correct CD for your license key. Windows Vista fixed this problem by having a universal CD that contained all versions (all 32bit versions or all 64bit versions, not both) and simply installed the version that the key matched.

Now that Windows 7 is out, Microsoft have reverted back to needing a separate disk for each version which is annoying for us computer technicians. However, the only difference between each DVD is a small 51 byte configuration file called ei.cfg which tells the installer what version disc it is. If you were to turn your DVD into an ISO, remove this ei.cfg file and write it back to a DVD, that DVD would become a Universal DVD.

ei.cfg Removal Utility will make this easy for you. Just create an ISO with your legitimate Windows 7 DVD, run this tool, choose the ISO and let it run. Once it has finished, just write the ISO back to a DVD again and you would only need to carry one 32bit version and one 64bit version to support any Windows 7 install onsite.

Of course, your client would still need to provide you with a working key for the Windows 7 install to work.

Downloads:
Download from the Coders Site – 4.64kb

How to Find and Report Known Malware URLs

Here is an interesting site called “Fighting Malware” at http://www.malwareurl.com . Fighting Malware is a website that lists the URLs of known malware, the IP address of the server it is on, the type of infection it is, the country it where it is hosted and the ability to look up more detailed information such as what the legitimate antiviruses detect it as.

Since this site lists the URLs of where you can get infected (be careful), it is a great place to infect a virtual machine of your own so you can practice your manual virus removal skills.

Additionally, if you ever come across a new infection this would be a great place to report it.

Capacity – 

Have you ever had to backup a clients files to a CD or DVD? I think most of us have at some point and it can be tedious sorting out how many files will fit on a single disk, especially if the client has a lot of data.

This is where Capacity comes in to make the task of backing up to CD or DVD much easier. Capacity will automatically separate the files into different CD or DVD sized folders. It can even create these CD/DVD sized folders based on the file type if you want so you can keep all documents on one CD and pictures on another. There is also other sorting criteria such as by month created, by month modified and by file size.

Capacity is small and mostly portable (requires .NET 3.5) application with a donation-ware license. This means it is free to use but if you like it you should consider donating to the developer.

This application is definitely worth keeping on your onsite USB drive and the backup machine in your workshop.

Downloads:
Download from Download.com – 4.57mb

Page Countster –

This tool is more for the technicians who have the job of looking over a business or school network. However, this could be used to find a single printer on a residential setup.

Page Countster is a small, portable and freeware application designed to scan a network for printers and display the information about them including the IP address, MAC Address, Host Name, Model Name, Serial Number, Total Page Count, Color Page Count and the ink levels.

Some other features that this application has is the ability to send the information to an email address or display it as a HTML report. Another neat feature is that you can right click on the printer and bring up more information including the loading of the printers web interface. You can also send a test page to any network printer without needing a driver.

Note: This application must be “Run as Administrator” as it makes use of RAW sockets. If you don’t, you will get a socket error.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Creators Site – 279kb

Rizone TakeOwnership Extension –

Microsoft has tightened up security in Windows Vista and 7 by disallowing access to critical system files using a Unix like permission system. While this is great for the average user because it helps protect them from viruses and themselves preventing them from being able to accidentally delete a critical system file. It isn’t so great for a Computer Technician who may need to access those areas.

Even if your user account is set to be an Administrator, there are many files and folders you cannot access including something as simple as changing the Start Menu under Windows 7. If you try, you will get an “Access Denied” error because SYSTEM owns this folder, not your user account. While there is a round-about way to assign yourself permission of these files, its a little long winded.

This is where Rizone’s “Take Ownership” Extension comes in. It is a small, freeware and portable application that will add a “Take Ownership” option to your right click context menu. Just right click on the file or folder you want to be able to access, and choose “Take Ownership” and it will assign you the necessary rights.


Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Creators Site – 335kb

Move Programs, Files & Settings to a New PC
	Getting a new computer is a lot like buying a new home - you get to
	look forward to a nicer place with more room, but before you can
	enjoy it you have to move everything there first. And with
	computers, you can't just "pick up" your software and settings and
	put it on the new PC - you need to reinstall everything from
	scratch, then change all the settings - for EACH program. Probably
	not your idea of a fun day (although since I'm a geek I actually
	enjoy it!).
	PCmover is the ONLY migration utility that moves programs, files,
	and settings from your old PC to your new PC. Simply install
	PCmover on both your old and new computers and go! PCmover will
	determine which programs, files, and settings need to be moved, and
	when the transfer is complete, your new computer will have the
	personality and functionality of your old PC as well as all of its
	own pre-installed software. Works with almost any Windows operating
	system.
	PCmover can migrate your PC across a network, Laplink USB cable,
	Windows Easy Transfer Cable or any type of removable media that can
	be read by both PCs. If your computer has multiple users, PCmover
	gives you the option to migrate some or all of the users at once.
	The security information about file ownership and access control is
	preserved for each user. You can even use PCmover to migrate your
	PC to an Intel-based Mac using VMware Fusion, Parallels or Bootcamp.
	PCmover can also be used to upgrade your existing PC from Windows
	XP to Windows 7. PCmover® Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant(TM) is a special
	edition of PCmover that does just this! Instead of migrating from
	one PC to another, many users simply desire to upgrade their
	existing computer to Microsoft's newest operating system.
	Imagine all the time you'll save going this route instead of trying
	to do everything by hand - and even then you might still not get it
	right! Visit the link below to buy PCmover or just learn more about
	it.
	Check out PCmover:
	http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=NwjU7&m=1pSLc2Jbm1Y7q8&b=msMoOqq9N2GTLkkRHJ16TQ
	
	

Rkill – 

The malware world is changing. It’s getting smarter.
In fact, some infections will detect that you have launched an anti-malware tool such as MalwareBytes and close it down as soon as you open it, which makes your job much harder. This is the exact situation Rkill is designed for.

Rkill is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to terminate active malware processes allowing you to use other removal tools. Rkill is made by a Microsoft MVP “Lawrence Abrams” and is available in 4 different extensions. An .EXE, .COM, .SCR and a .PIF file.
The reason why Rkill comes in 4 different versions is because some malware will block .EXE files in an attempt to prevent you from running other malware removal tools, so this gets around that problem.

I tested this tool on a virtual machine which I had infected with a fake antivirus and Rkill killed the malicious processes without any problems. Of course, I then had to delete the malicious files manually as this is not a malware removal tool, but a malware process killing tool. It just stops the malware from running right now, allowing you work your computer technician magic.

Downloads:
rkill.exe – Download from BleepingComputer.com – 257kb
rkill.com – Download from BleepingComputer.com – 257kb
rkill.scr – Download from BleepingComputer.com – 257kb
rkill.pif – Download from BleepingComputer.com – 257kb

.NET Framework Cleanup Utility – 

“.NET Framework Cleanup Utility” is a small, portable and freeware application designed to remove selected versions of the .NET Framework from a computer. It is intended to be used when the install, uninstall, repair or patching of the .NET Framework will not work correctly.
When this cleanup tool is run, it will remove the files, directories, registry keys and Add/Remove Programs entries that make up the .NET Framework.

This application has some nice features such as allowing you to choose which version of .NET Framework you want to remove. It also has a silent/unattended mode which I am sure the Technibble scripters will enjoy. Be sure to read the readme.txt file as it contains some handy usage information plus the download links for the .NET Framework installers.

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 255kb

PstPassword – 

I have many clients who have placed passwords on their Outlook PST files to prevent family members or employees from accessing their emails. However, if they ever forget that password they have a problem – this is where PstPassword comes in.

PstPassword is a small, freeware and portable application designed to recover the password from a locked .PST file. The password encryption in Outlook is very weak and for each password protected PST file there will be 3 different passwords that could open it. One of them may be the original password that the client entered, or all 3 might be different to the original.

Keep in mind, if you are after the email account password (as in the one their ISP gave them), then you would use MailPassView instead.

Note: Due to the password grabbing nature of this tool, some antivirus products may detect it as a malicious file. This is a false positive.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 38.6kb

CrystalDiskInfo –

CrystalDiskInfo is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to read the S.M.A.R.T data of a Hard Drive and come to an overall conclusion of the hard drives health. It will also display the S.M.A.R.T data as a list so you can see the specific issue that a hard drive may have.
This application has a wealth of other features such as showing the temperature of the hard drive, easily make it start up when the system starts, graph the health of a hard drive over time and more.

Note: This application starts up in the Japanese language. To change it to English, goto the rightmost toolbar option where it says (Language), then choose A-N, then English.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 1mb

Windows 7 Problems

Microsoft has released a detailed report about some problems in Windows 7 including memory leaks and being frozen.

A memory leak happens when Power Manager opens an ALPC which stands for Advanced Local Procedure Call port and closes another port. The operating system should have closed the ALPC. The machine would eventually crash if this happen.

Another problem occurs if a notebook with a Vista, Server 2008, or 7 is put to sleep.

The third issue affects Intel 5 and 3400 Series with either Home Premium, Professional, or Ultimate version of Windows 7.

SSDTweaker –

While technically not a “repair tool”, SSDTweaker is an application designed to tweak an operating system to get the most out of a Solid State Drive.
Solid State Drives (SSD) have a massive speed advantage over older hard drives because there are no moving parts. However, one of the disadvantages of SSD’s is that each data block on the drive has a limited amount of times it can be overwritten (about 10,000 vs a Hard Drives 1-5 million cycles). Windows constantly writes information to the hard drive such as indexing the files to make file searches faster, creating a page file and more. This will reduce the performance of an solid state drive over time.

This is where SSDTweaker comes in, SSDTweaker allows you to tweak the following:

• Windows Indexing Service
• System Restore
• Windows Defrag
• Use Large System Cache
• NTFS Memory Usage
• Disable 8.3 Filenames
• Disable Date Stamping
• Disable Boot Tracing
• Windows Prefetcher
• Windows Vista Superfetch
• Windows Services

SSDTweaker will also recommend which settings to disable for optimal SSD performance. These tweaks are at an operating system level (mostly just registry tweaks) so it should work with any SSD model.

SSDTweaker is small, freeware and works on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7 including both their 32 and 64bit variants.

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 135kb

Reprofiler –

A common problem that occurs with just about all modern Windows operating systems is when a Windows user loses access to their data and settings. For some reason, Windows no longer recognizes a profile belonging to its user and the next time that user logs on, it appears as a fresh account. This can be caused by a hard drive error, joining/leaving a domain, file system issues and a change of username.

Reprofiler is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to reassign the data and settings of a Windows user account to another account. There are ways for technicians to do this with some registry tweaks and by changing permissions (which I have personally had to do a handful of times) but this application makes it much easier so all you have to do is press some buttons.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 512kb

LookInMyPC – 

LookInMyPC is a small, portable and freeware tool designed to generate a very comprehensive report of a system and export it to a HTML page. It will display Running Processes, Installed Devices, Drivers, Services, Startup Programs, Windows Updates, TCP/IP Port Usage, Registry Run Entries, System Restore Information, Event Log detail and much much more.

Here is a sample of a report that LookInMyPC produces:
http://www.lookinmypc.com/ReportPage1.htm
http://www.lookinmypc.com/ReportPage2.htm

This application has a nice feature where you can compare previous reports to the current one so you can easily see what changed between then and now.

Special thanks to the Technibble forum member iisjman07 for recommending this one.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 1.8mb

7 Quick Fix 1.0 – 

7 Quick Fix is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to quickly fix common errors that may occur under Windows 7 and is able to re-enable certain parts of the system (such as Task Manager) after a virus attack.
7 Quick Fix can fix 21 common errors including Slow Shutdowns, Slow Thumbnails, Missing System Tray Icons, Missing DVD Drives and more. For the Windows XP equivalent, check out XPQuickFix.

• Enable Task Manager
• Enable Command Prompt
• Enable Registry Editor
• Enable Folder Options
• Reboot After Update (stops “You must restart for changes to take effect” after updates)
• Update Shutdown (prevents updates hijacking sleep button when there are updates to do)
• Show Shutdown
• Slow Thumbnail
• Restore Aero Function
• Disable IPv6
• Enable IPv6
• No DVD Drive
• Installer Crash
• Slow Menu
• Theme Changes (prevents themes changing cursors and desktop icons, but changes everything else)
• System Tray (fixes missing system tray icons after updates)
• Enable Taskbar Properties
• Taskbar Context
• Win-X Shortcuts (re-enables disabled Win-X shortcuts)
• Display Properties (re-enables)
• Control Panel (re-enables)

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from CNet – 463kb

“Dancing with the Stars Lineup 2010″ Malware

When you visit it, you’ll see your typical “You have 100 viruses” scareware.

Once installed, the malware product appears to be the rogue antivirus “CleanUp Antivirus”.

As Patrick said “I’ll bet its making them a fortune”. Such an innocent query with a malicious site as the top result. If you ever do encounter this infection, BleepingComputer.com have removal instructions for Cleanup Antivirus.

HashTab – 

HashTab is a small, free, Windows shell extension that adds a tab called “File Hashes” to the Windows Explorer file properties (there is also a Mac version). This tab will allow you to see the hash information of a file.

So why should you care about the hash information of a file? Hashes, which appear to be a long string of numbers and letters are designed to verify the integrity of a file. The creator or host of a file will often provide the Hash of a file and once you have downloaded it, you can view the hash of the file on your own computer and compare them. If they don’t match there may have been some sort of corruption during the download.
The chances of a file becoming corrupted during download increases as the file becomes larger. So, if you were downloading something like a 600mb Linux ISO, you will definitely want to check its Hash.

The other use of Hashes is for security reasons. Lets say that there is a download link of a certain application on a popular site. This application is so popular that the creator has been forced to host the file on various mirrors to save on bandwidth. The problem is, how would you know if one of those mirrors has been compromised and that the file hasn’t been altered? You would compare the hash provided on the site to the hash of the file that you downloaded.

Hashtab makes that task easy. In fact, I have provided the MD5 Hash of the Hashtab setup file so you can check it yourself. To check it, right click on the file once you have downloaded it, goto “Properties” and then the “File Hashes” tab. Copy and paste the MD5 hash provided below into the application and it will compare them.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Windows Version – Download from Official Site – 780kb (MD5: 5845F52D425C75E232B1AD5EE3B189A8 )
Mac OSX Version – Download from Official Site – 2.6mb (MD5: 9AF1CCDB8FF59A0E8AF219F3239BEBE2 )

XP_Fileassoc.bat & XP_EXE_Fix.reg –

I have been seeing the Facebook Password Reset Virus on a lot of computers lately and one of the things that this virus does is disables the EXE association with the computer. Basically what this means is that you cannot open .EXE files and since most of your software repair tools are going to be executable files, it makes the virus difficult to remove

To get around this, I have been using two scripts that restore all of the file associations in Windows XP back to default. Once it has been run, I can then use my other virus removal applications like Process Explorer.

The .EXE association can be damaged in a few ways. One way is when the extension association “.exe” doesn’t point to “exefile”. Another way is when the registry for opening .exe files has an incorrect value.

One of the tools is a BAT file and the other one is a .REG file. The problem is sometimes the .REG file association is damaged too so I have to use the BAT file first to fix the .REG association, and then the .REG file to fix the registry.

In any case, the two work well together.

Downloads:
XP_Fileassoc.bat – Download from Technibble (right click, save as) – 6kb

XP_Exe_Fix.reg – Download from Technibble (right click, save as) – 2.6kb

OfficeIns – 

OfficeIns is a small, portable and free application designed to display all of the installed add-ins for Microsoft Office products including Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Access, Visio, and FrontPage. Once displayed, you have the ability enable/disable them and change how they start up.

Why would you want to do this? Because some applications will drop an addin into one of these programs and if there is some incompatibility, it can prevent one of the Office products from running. A good example would be an Internet Security application dropping an anti-spam/email-scanner addin into Microsoft Outlook.

In the last two computer repair jobs where I needed something like this, one of them was CA Antvirus’s addin for Outlook and it was causing Outlook to crash on startup. The other job was an error message that would always show up saying a DLL for a certain addin wasn’t found. OfficeIns can easily deal with both of these issues.

Downloads:
Download from Official Site (Download Link and More Information) – 35kb

Stalled Printer Repair – 

Stalled Printer Repair is a small, freeware and portable application designed to clear the printer spool if any jobs get stuck in there. You may have seen a stuck print job when something doesn’t print, you choose Cancel or Delete and it just sits there saying “Deleting..” but never completes.

It is possible to clear the printer spool by going to “C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers\” and deleting its contents or writing a BAT script to do this. However, its nice to have a single click application that will also list the stalled print jobs.

Downloads:
Download from Official Site (Download Link and More Information. Zip version is portable) – 346kb

Scripting Your Own Computer Repair Tools – Part 1

I am a huge fan of scripting. If I have to do a certain task on a computer often, then I would definitely try and create an automated script so all I have to do is run one file.
Additionally, having these scripts can give me an edge over my competitors. Lets say I have 2 computers to repair on my workbench. One of them has a tricky issue that requires most of my attention and the other one requires me to do something I have done a hundred times before.

Since I have made a script to do the task I have done a hundred times before, I can focus my attention on the other computer. If the script does the task quicker than I can do manually, it gives me an advantage over my competitors since I can either lower my price because it took less time; or have a fixed price and use the time I saved to work on another computer resulting in more computers fixed on the day.

In this article I am going to show you some scripting basics so you can make some useful computer technician tools for your business. Alright, lets get started. To begin, we’ll work with good old Windows BATCH (.BAT) scripts.

Now we have that out of the way, a task that computer technicians frequently have to do is backup their clients data, so lets make a little script to do that.
I am going to want the clients CDKeys for their operating system and maybe Microsoft Office if they have it. While there isnt a command to do this in Windows batch scripting, I can use Nirsofts ProduKey to get it. I really like Nirsofts software because just about everything they release can be run from the command line allowing us to work them into scripts.

Download ProduKey from here (32bit) (64bit version here) and extract the zip somewhere you will remember like your desktop.

In the same folder as the extracted ProduKey.exe, create a new notepad text file and open it. Now we need to find out what the commands are for ProduKey so we can make it work from a script. Goto the Produkey website by clicking here and if we scroll half way down the page we will see “Command-Line Options”. The first table has commands for getting information remotely but we are going to assume we are actually at the computer when we do this. So, look at the first line of the second table and we will see:

/stext - Save the list of product keys into a regular text file

In our text file we made just a moment ago, write:

produkey.exe /stext Keys.txt

What we are telling the script to do is to run ProduKey and write the CDKeys to a text file called Keys.txt

Now, save this text file as a .BAT file (or save as a TXT, then change the extension to .BAT) in the same directory as the ProduKey.exe

If you did it correctly, when we run this .BAT file it should show a black command window very quickly and a file called Keys.txt should appear. In this Keys.txt file you should see the CD Keys for the installed Microsoft software.

This is a very simple Batch script but lets take it even further. Lets grab the Mail settings too using Nirsofts MailPassView.

Download MailPassView here and extract it to the same directory we put ProduKey.exe in. Now lets goto the MailPassView page here and find out what the command line options are.

It appears that we can also use the /stext command on MailPassView as well. So lets edit our .BAT file again in Notepad (Right click and choose Edit if you closed Notepad) and add our MailPassView command on a new line.

produkey.exe /stext Keys.txt
mailpv.exe /stext Mail.txt

When you save and run the BAT file, two files called Keys.txt and Mail.txt should be created containing the information we want. There are lots of programs that allow you to do things from the command line like this, but I’ll get to them in a later part of this series.

You know, since I am working with many computers a day, I am going to forget which computer these Keys.txt and Mail.txt belong to, so I am going to separate them.

Microsoft Windows has many built in variables you can use for scripting purposes. If you are new to programming, variables are values that change.
Here is a good example of why we want to use variables. Lets say I wanted to access my desktop in a script. I could do the following:
cd “c:\Documents and Settings\Bryce\Desktop”

But there is one big problem, the computers I will be running this on wont have “Bryce” as a username, it’ll be something else like Admin, Owner, Jeff, John, Jill etc..

So, I’ll need to use a Windows variable called %USERPROFILE%.
Windows will replace this variable with “c:\Documents and Settings\Username” and the Username part will be replaced with the current users Username. If the current user was John, %USERPROFILE% would become “c:\Documents and Settings\John”. So if I wanted to access the current users desktop, regardless of what the username is, I would use: cd “%USERPROFILE%\Desktop”

For future reference, here is a good source listing the Windows Environment Variables.

Now lets get back to separating our Keys.txt and Mail.txt files for each computer. I am going to use the computers name to separate the text files. To do this I am going to fetch the computers name using the %COMPUTERNAME% variable and make a directory of that name, then place our text files in there. The command to make a directory is “md” or “mkdir”.

I personally prefer mkdir so I am tell mkdir to make a directory with the name of the computer, but I am going to put this at the top of the script. The reason why we are going to put it at the top of the script is because we need to make the directory first so next lines can place their files in it:

mkdir "%COMPUTERNAME%"

If my computer was named Bryce-PC, the directory that was just made would also be called Bryce-PC. Now I need to tell ProduKey and MailPassView to put their information in this folder so I am going to change the location it places the files to "%COMPUTERNAME%\Keys.txt". I have also added quotation marks around this variable because if the computer name has any spaces in it, it wont work. This is what the entire script should look like now:

mkdir "%COMPUTERNAME%"
produkey.exe /stext "%COMPUTERNAME%\Keys.txt"
mailpv.exe /stext "%COMPUTERNAME%\Mail.txt"

Save these changes and delete the old Keys.txt mail Mail.txt files that might have been created earlier so we dont get confused. Now run the script.

It should create a folder with the name of the computer you are running it on and have the two text files inside it. You could place this script (along with produkey.exe and mailpv.exe of course) on your USB drive and run it on any Windows based PC.

Here is the complete set of files and scripts we talked about above if you are having trouble and need to see what it should look like. I have included the Help Files in this zip file to comply with Nirsoft’s licensing, but they are not needed. However, they do have some command line information in them if you dont want to use the Nirsoft site. Be sure to extract the zip file first before running anything in it.

Thats the end of the first part of our scripting tutorial. In the next part I’ll show you how to create a script to backup the main parts of a system (Desktop, Favorites, My Documents etc..).

You aren’t just limited to creating a backup script or even using Nirsofts tools, you can use any application with command line options but this is a good starting point. If you wish to continue experimenting with this before the next article is posted, maybe you could expand the script to fetch the saved Wireless Keys as well? (if one exists, otherwise it would be blank).

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their computer business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. If you need a website for your computer repair services, check out the Tech Website Builder.
If you want to learn how to repair laptops, check out these narrated, high definition videos. These would pay for themselves in 1 repair job.

Scripting Your Own Computer Repair Tools – Part 1

In this article I am going to make use of a very useful command called xcopy. Some of the older technicians who were working with computers in the DOS days should know this command fairly well. XCOPY is a powerful version of the DOS copy command with some additional features. It has the ability to move single files, directories or even whole drives from one location to another. For our backup script, this command will come in very handy when we use the appropriate “switches”.

So what are “switches?” Most command line applications have “switches” that allow you to alter how the application will work. In Part 1′s example where we used ProduKey to export the systems CD Keys, we used the switch /stext that will output the information to a text file. We could have used another switch like /shtml and that would have exported the information to a html page. We are still using the same ProduKey file, but are manipulating how it works by using switches.

The XCOPY command has switches as well, in fact, many of them. There are too many to list here but this is the command I am going to be using to backup the clients data (in his case, their favorites):
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Favorites" "Favorites"

Unlike ProduKey were we only used a single switch after typing the application name, we are going to use 8 different ones for xcopy. This is the breakdown of what each switch we are using and what it tells xcopy to do:

• /C – Continues copying even if an error occurs. Basically our script wont come to a halt if it encounters a problem. It’ll just skip that file and continue
• /D – Copies files changed on or after a specified date. Since no date was specified it copies only those files whose source time is newer than the destination time. This is good for us because if we need to run the script again as it wont copy everything again, just what changed
• /E – Copies directories and subdirectories, including empty ones. If you use the /S switch it’ll exclude empty directories
• /H – Copies hidden and system files as well. Who knows what our client has in a hidden folder
• /I – If the destination doesnt existing and copying more than one file, assume it is a directory
• /R – Overwrites read-only files. This is good if we need to run the script again and read-only files are present
• /Y – This will stop the script from asking you to confirm whether you want to overwrite a file that already exists at the destination. Again, this is good in case we need to run the script again

In short, we have told xcopy to continue copying if an error occurs. If the file already exists, only copy newer versions. Copy all directories and subdirectories even if they are empty. Copy hidden and system files too. If the file already exists and it is read-only, overwrite it anyway and don’t ask us for permission to overwrite existing files. For a full list of the xcopy switches, check out this page.

Lets start making our script. To begin, Create a folder somewhere other than our Desktop or My Documents. In that folder, create a new text file and add the following line to it.

xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Favorites" "Favorites"

Now, save this text file as a .BAT file (or save as a TXT, then change the extension to .BAT). This command is going to copy the currently logged-on users “Favorites” folder and copy it to whereever this script is located. If you remember the %USERPROFILE% variable from Part 1, this will be filled out with something like “C:\Documents and Settings\Bryce” in Windows XP or “C:\Users\Bryce” in Windows Vista and 7.

Close your text editor and run this BAT file, if you did it correctly you should see the current users Favorites folder appear next to the script. We wont need to have the xcopy application next to the script like we did with ProduKey because the xcopy command is built into Windows.

While we are at it, lets grab the content of the current users Desktop as well.

xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Favorites" "Favorites"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop" "Desktop"

If you save and run this script, you’ll see the Desktop folder appear in the same folder as the script.

Now, if you run this script on multiple computers, the all of the different clients data is going to end up in the same folders and we obviously don’t want that. We need to separate them.
In Part 1, we separated our CDKeys and Mail settings using the %COMPUTERNAME% variable which will put them in a folder that has the same name as the computer (eg. Office-PC). The problem with that is the users Desktop and Favorite folders are username specific so we need to sort the files by computer name AND user account. To do this we can use the %USERNAME% variable and change our script to:

xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Favorites" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Favorites"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Desktop"

If my computers name was “BrycePC” and my user account was “Admin”. The Favorites backup would be located in “BrycePC\Admin\Favorites”. If I ran it on another account on the same PC (lets say “Bryce”), the folder structure would be:

We can also get away with not first creating the Computer Name and Username folder as we did in the last lesson using the mkdir command because if the folder doesn’t exist, the script will create it.

Now lets add the “My Documents” directory to the script. To make this work in Windows XP we would do something like this:
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\My Documents"

However, since Windows Vista came along, there is no “My Documents” folder, it is now just “Documents”. To have this line work in Windows Vista and Windows 7, it would need to be:

xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Documents" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Documents"

Even though the %USERPROFILE% variable used to become “C:\Documents and Settings\Admin” in Windows XP, it is still valid in Windows Vista and 7 as it just replaces %USERPROFILE% with the newer value of “C:\Users\Admin” and it will still work.

To get over the Documents vs My Documents problem. You would need one copy of this script for Windows XP and another for Windows Vista/7. It is possible let the user choose the operating system (Press 1 for XP, Press 2 for Vista/7), but that is a bit advanced for a simple tutorial like this. If you are feeling adventurous, check out the script I made previously that lets the user choose.

To finish this script off, I want to make it so that it doesnt close as soon as it finishes. The reason why I want to do this is so I can see the files it has copied over. To prevent the script closing we can add the following at the very bottom:

@pause

Now, if I have some employees using this script, they may not know why the script has stopped. So I am going to get the script to tell us that the backup is complete by adding the following command just before the pause:

echo Backup Complete!

Anything starting with “echo” will be printed on the screen and wont be run as code.

In the end, our entire script should look like this:

Windows XP version:
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Favorites" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Favorites"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Desktop"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\My Documents"
echo Backup Complete!
@pause

Windows Vista/7 version:
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Favorites" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Favorites"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Desktop"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Documents" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Documents"
echo Backup Complete!
@pause

You could also pair this up with what we learned in Part 1 and grab the CD Keys and Email settings too (for XP):
mkdir "%COMPUTERNAME%"
produkey.exe /stext "%COMPUTERNAME%\Keys.txt"
mailpv.exe /stext "%COMPUTERNAME%\Mail.txt"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Favorites" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Favorites"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Desktop"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\My Documents"
echo Backup Complete!
@pause

Of course, this isn’t a limit of what you would want to back up, you would still need to backup emails, address books etc.. but this is just an example.

If you are having problems, Here is a sample of what we have talked about in this article.

Note: This script is for educational purposes only. If you use a script like this in a production environment, always ALWAYS check to make sure that the files actually copied. This script assumes that the client has not moved any of their folders from the default locations. I cannot be held responsible for any losses.

As mentioned in the last article, you aren’t limited to just copying files like this from one place to another. This was just an example. There are plenty of other file management commands such as the move command, the delete command and the select all command. A good list of them can be found on this site including their usage/switches.

Scripting Your Own Computer Repair Tools – Part 3

Posted: 19 Apr 2010 11:54 AM PDT

In part 1 of “Scripting Your Own Computer Repair Tools”, I showed you how to create scripts that make use of certain applications. In part 2 I showed you how to make scripts to manipulate files. In part 3 we are going to cover the use of IF statements, GOTO’s and setting variables. To demonstrate all three we are going to make a mutli-choice menu that allows us to choose what our script does.

First, let me explain what IF statements and GOTO’s do:
“IF Statements” allow us to test whether a certain condition is true and if it is, perform a certain action. If its false, the script will continue onto the next line.

“GOTOs” tell the script to goto another location in the script with the “Label” you specify, ignoring all the code that was before that point. Labels are identified with a colon in front of them.

Here is an example of me using both. I have spaced these out so it is more readable, but this still is a single script:

@ECHO OFF
IF "%USERNAME%"==Bryce GOTO CORRECT

:WRONG
ECHO Your Windows Username is NOT Bryce! It is "%USERNAME%"
GOTO END

:CORRECT
ECHO Your Windows Username IS Bryce!
:END
@PAUSE

Lets break that code down:

@ECHO OFF – This tells the script not to show the word “ECHO” when it says whether the answer was wrong or right. Just show the text after it.

IF %USERNAME%==Bryce GOTO CORRECT – We have used the system variable %USERNAME% in our past examples and it contains the username of the person who is currently logged onto the computer. The IF statement asks if the username equals “Bryce”. If it does, then GOTO the location called “:CORRECT”.
If the username is NOT Bryce, then the script will continue down the page. The script always works its way down the code unless told otherwise.

:WRONG – This is what the code does if the username is NOT Bryce. In this example we have told it to ECHO (meaning print on the screen) that the username is not Bryce and tell what the username actually is. Windows will fill out the username variable with what the username really is.

After it tells the user what the username is, it says GOTO END. Now, remember how I said that the script will work its way down the code unless told otherwise? If I don’t have this “GOTO END” part, the script will continue to run down the page and display the correct answer as well, which we don’t want.

So, I placed an :END label at the end of the script and told the script to GOTO END which “jumps” the :CORRECT part and thus the correct text never shows.

:CORRECT – This part is similar to the :WRONG part except that it says the answer is correct. This part doesnt need a GOTO END part like WRONG had because there is nothing below it. It is not a problem when the script continues down the page since it will end anyway.

@PAUSE – This just pauses the script and prevents it from closing the command window so we can see our results.

Setting Variables
As mentioned in the previous articles, variables are values that change. Variables like %USERNAME% are system variables that are set by Windows. However, we can actually set and call upon our own variables. Lets start a new script and create our own.

@ECHO OFF
SET XX=Fish
ECHO %XX% And Chips!
@PAUSE

In this example we set the XX variable to “Fish”. We then tell the computer to print out “%XX% And Chips”. Since the XX variable has been set to “Fish”, it will print out “Fish And Chips!”

We can also set variables on the fly based on what the user typed in using the /P switch (which stands for prompt). In a new script, add the following:

@ECHO OFF
SET /P XX=Type a number, then press ENTER:
ECHO You Pressed %XX%
@PAUSE

Anything the user types after “Type a number, then press ENTER:” will become the value of the variable. If you type 8, %XX% will now carry the value 8.

Now, Lets Put It To Good Use. Lets Create a Menu!
Create a new script and add the following:

@ECHO OFF
:MENU
ECHO.
ECHO Choose a Door:
ECHO 1 - Door Number 1
ECHO 2 - Door Number 2
ECHO 3 - Door Number 3
ECHO 4 - Exit the game
SET /P XX=Type 1, 2, 3 or 4, then press ENTER:

IF %XX% ==1 GOTO DOOR1
IF %XX% ==2 GOTO DOOR2
IF %XX% ==3 GOTO DOOR3
IF %XX% ==4 GOTO EOF

:DOOR1
ECHO You chose Door Number 1 and fell into the snake pit. You are dead.
GOTO MENU

:DOOR2
ECHO You chose Door Number 2 which is the path to the outside. You are free!
GOTO MENU

:DOOR3
ECHO You chose Door Number 3 and there was a Lion behind it. You are dead.
GOTO MENU

In this example, we used ECHO to tell the user what the options are so they know what to choose. We then then set the variable based on what the user typed with SET /P XX.
Once the variable has been set, we check what it was set to with the IF statement. We will assume that the user pressed 2 so IF %XX% was set to 2, GOTO DOOR2.
The script then jumps to the :DOOR2 label and runs the code in there. In this example it prints “You chose Door Number 2 which is the path to the outside. You are free!”.
To prevent the script from running the DOOR3 code, we told the script to go back to the MENU label which is at the top of our script above the menu options.
The script will then work its way down the script again running the menu code and asking us which door to choose again.
The only way to get out of this loop is to choose option 4 which says GOTO EOF. “EOF” stands for “End Of File” and it will close the script down.

Lets Make a Technician Tool
Now that you know how to make a basic menu, lets make a technician tool.
If we choose option 1 it will fetch the computers mail settings and CD keys (which we learned in Part 1). This part requires produkey.exe and mailpv.exe in the same directory.
If we choose option 2 it will copy the contents of the current users Desktop to the folder the script is currently running from (which we learned in Part 2).
If we choose option 3 it will display the currently logged on users username (learned in Part 1)
If we choose option 4 it will close the script.

In a new script, NOT located on the Desktop, add the following:

@ECHO OFF
:MENU
ECHO.
ECHO What do you want to do?:
ECHO 1 - Collect Mail Settings and CDKeys (needs produkey.exe and mailpv.exe in same folder)
ECHO 2 - Copy the current users Desktop folder
ECHO 3 - Display the currently logged on Username
ECHO 4 - Exit
SET /P XX=Type 1, 2, 3 or 4, then press ENTER:

IF %XX% ==1 GOTO KEYS
IF %XX% ==2 GOTO COPYDESKTOP
IF %XX% ==3 GOTO LOGGEDON
IF %XX% ==4 GOTO EOF

:KEYS
produkey.exe /stext "%COMPUTERNAME%\Keys.txt"
mailpv.exe /stext "%COMPUTERNAME%\Mail.txt"
GOTO MENU

:COPYDESKTOP
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Desktop"
GOTO MENU

:LOGGEDON
ECHO The currently logged on user is "%USERNAME%"
GOTO MENU

I kept this example fairly simple so it is easy to follow but you can imagine the possibilities with the script like this. I have created a zip file which you can download here containing all of these examples we have talked about if you need help or just want to keep the samples for reference.

In Part 4, Ill show you some handy applications you can make based off what we have learned.
In the mean time, don’t forget that Technibble has a rich scripting community on the forums with a handful of scripting gurus in there. The scripting forum isn’t visible to those not logged in, been on the forums for a few days and made a few posts since we don’t want them to be visible to Google and non-technicians.

© Technibble - A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their computer business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. If you need a website for your computer repair services, check out the Tech Website Builder.
If you want to learn how to repair laptops, check out these narrated, high definition videos. These would pay for themselves in 1 repair job.

Scripting Your Own Computer Repair Tools – Part 3

Scripting Your Own Computer Repair Tools – Part 4

In part 1 of our “Scripting Your Own Repair Tools” series, I showed you how to make use of applications to do tasks that the DOS commandline cannot do alone. In those examples, we gathered the computers CDKeys using the Nirsoft tool Produkey. In this article, I will be showing you a handful of useful applications that you can use to extend the functionality of your batch scripts.

Downloading Files with WGET
“WGET for Windows” is the Windows equivalent of the Unix-based wget command. Basically, this command will download a file from the URL you provide it. It supports FTPs, Proxies, password protected locations and more.

You can download WGET and view the available switches here. The typical usage for WGET would be:
wget http://nirsoft.net/utils/mailpv.zip

Zipping/Unzipping with 7Zip
7Zip is pretty well known compression tool amongst computer technicians, but did you know that it has a command line version as well?
You can download the command line version from here.
To make use of it, you can read about the available switches with some examples from this site. Here is an example of how to extract a zip file called mailpv.zip using the 7zip command line:
7za e mailpv.zip

You can also do opposite and make zip files. This example below will add the contents of the current users desktop. Then the zip file will be named whatever the current users username is:
7za a -tzip "%USERNAME%.zip" "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop"

Do Many Useful Tasks with NirCmd
NirCmd is a small command-line utility that allows you to do some useful tasks without displaying any user interface. NirCmd allows you to write and delete values and keys in the Registry, write values into INI file, dial to your internet account or connect to a VPN network, restart windows or shut down the computer, create shortcut to a file, change the created/modified date of a file, change your display settings, turn off your monitor, open the door of your CD-ROM drive, and more…
You can download NirCmd here and view the full help file containing the switches with some examples here.

Built-in DOS Commands
Since we are working with DOS batch scripts, pretty much any command that you would use with DOS will work in our batch scripts. Here is a site that has a large list of DOS commands you can make use of, including some examples.

You can also chain a bunch of DOS commands together and do some interesting things. For example, there is a command that allows you to change whether a service starts when Windows loads. With this command, you could create a script that turns off any unneeded services:
sc config RemoteRegistry start= DISABLED
sc config TabletInputService start= DISABLED
..and so on.

You could also reset the computers network settings with the following command:
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /renew

Or even clear the systems Temporary Internet Files: (be careful)
attrib +a -s -h -r "%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\*.*" /s
del /f /s /q "%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\*.*"

Then there is Robocopy. Robocopy is built into Windows Vista and Windows 7 and is a very powerful file management tool allowing you to perform advanced actions with files. For example, you could only copy files that have changed since the last backup. As you could imagine, this would be great for backup scripts. You can view Robocopy’s switches with some examples on this site.

You can also launch another batch file, from within the current batch file with the CALL command. You can use this to keep your code neat by having a Menu batch file and once the user selects a number, it calls the appropriate BAT file to do the task. This is how you would use it:
CALL BatchFile2.bat

Some Useful Applications That Support Command Line Use
You will be surprised of how many common applications have command-line versions and switches that you can make use of. Here are just a few:

• Nirsoft software – Multiple utilities
• Sysinternals software – Multiple utilities
• CCleaner (switches) – Temporary files cleaner
• Driveimage XML (switches) – Hard drive imaging software (free for personal use, $100 for 5 user commercial license)
• Microsoft Outlook (not a command line version, but tons of maintenance switches)
• WinSCP (switches) – FTP/SFTP/SCP client
• Hijack This (switches) – Malware remover
• PCDecrapifier (switches) – Removes installed applications on new computers (can set off AV false positives)
• System Information for Windows (switches) – Gathers a lot of information about a system
• JavaRa (switches) – Removes old versions of Java
• MyDefrag Formerly JKDefrag (switches) – Defragging utility
• Unstoppable Copier (switches) – File copying application
• Clamwin Antivirus (unofficial switches post, scroll to bottom of page) – Virus Scanner

Scripting Your Own Computer Repair Tools – Part 4

iSSIDer – Find Wireless Networks

inSSIDer is a small freeware application designed to scan for wireless networks within the reach of your wireless antenna. When wireless networks are found, it will display them in both list form and graphic form. The list form will show you the the MAC address, SSID, Channel, RSSI, Security Type, Network Type, Speed, Time it was first seen and time it was last seen.
The graph form will give you a visual reference of how strong each wireless signal is. This is great when you are walking around with a laptop trying to find the strongest signal location.

NetStumbler used to be the old favorite but unfortunately it doesn’t work well with Windows Vista or the 64 bit version of Windows XP. Additionally, NetStumbler hasn’t been updated in a long time so it may not support some of the more modern wireless cards. inSSIDer, on the other hand, works great with Windows Vista and XP. It is also open source.

The only downside of inSSIDer is that it is not portable since it requires .NET 2.0 to be installed. However, I usually use my own laptop when seeking out dead spots in my clients home or business, so it has never been a problem for me.

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 2.24mb

Large List of Downloadable Computer Repair CDs

Also, some of these CD’s may set off an antivirus false positive due to their virus removal, password cracking, system file changing nature. Konboot is one such CD that will set off antivirus software. Its best to scan the CDs that are setting off your antivirus using a site like Virustotal.com and make your own decisions.

Some CDs have been purposely left out of this list as they contain illegal software.

Creating Multiboot CDs
Many people have expressed an interest in creating a multi-boot CD or USB stick. SARDU (Shardana Antivirus Rescue Utility) is a program that creates multiboot cd’s and usb sticks. Basically you download the ISO’s of bootable cd’s you want from this list that are supported by SARDU, then you download SARDU. When you extract SARDU there is an empty folder called ISO’s and you put the iso’s you download into that folder. When you run SARDU, it will find all the ISO’s that you downloaded and stuck in the folder, and offer to build you a cd or usb stick.
You can download SARDU Here. Thanks to Thor and AtYourService for contributing information about SARDU.

Special thanks to PcTek9, Methical, AtYourService, IISJMAN7, rusty.Nells, Thor999, Hyfidel, Studiot, Crash and other Technibble forum members who have contributed to this list.

Disclaimer: You use this software at your own risk. Technibble or its members cannot be held accountable for any damage to hardware, software, loss of data, or any other direct or indirect damage caused by using this software. Some of these CD’s contain cryptographic software which is illegal in some countries, so be sure to follow your local laws. Using any of this software is an agreement that you understand and acknowledge this.

Large List of Downloadable Computer Repair CDs

Everything – Fast, Intelligent Search

Posted: 30 Apr 2010 11:34 AM PDT

Everything is small, free and portable application designed to search through a system at crazy fast speeds. It achieves these fast searching speeds by only the searching file names, rather than the contents of the file.

Where this really tears away from the built in Windows search (other than its incredibly fast searching) is that it supports boolean and regex operators. For example, if you want to search for ABC but want it to exclude any file with 123 in its name, you would do: abc !123

Or perhaps you want to search for a file that is named “grey”, but you also might have saved it as “gray”. You could search for both with: gr(a|e)y

It takes a few seconds to archive your files when it is first run (about 15 seconds for the 3TB in this system) but once it has done that, all future search results will appear almost instantly.

Be sure to read Everything’s FAQ to see its full capabilties and the boolean/regex commands it supports.

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 272kb

Dropbox – Online Backup and File Sync

While this is not a “repair tool”, I have seen many technicians making use of this application and service. The Dropbox service provides you with 2GB of free online storage and has a great syncing application to go with it. Once the syncing application is installed, it creates a “My Dropbox” folder in your My Documents and all you have to do is drop a file in that folder and it will sync to the Dropbox service.
Some computer technicians are using this as a free way for their clients to backup their data, other technicians are using it to store a copy of their computer repair tools and other information.

An example of me using it with my phone would be uploading my copy of the Computer Technicians Quick Reference Guide PDF to my Dropbox account, then read it on my iPhone which has the Dropbox application. No need to power up my Netbook, its right there on my phone.

You dont even need to have the application installed to access your Dropbox files. You can also log into the site and access your files via a web browser. If you want to share files in your Dropbox account with the public, you can upload files to the public part of your Dropbox account and give people the download link.

The functionality doesn’t end there, people are creating new ways to use their Dropbox accounts such as controlling their computer remotely, syncing application profiles and more (1, 2).

Link: Dropbox

SARDU – Turn All Those Bootable CDs into 1 Mutliboot Disc

SARDU (Shardana Antivirus Rescue Disk Utility) is a small freeware utility designed to combine all of your bootable ISOs and turn them into a single ISO with a boot menu. You can either burn this ISO to a single CD/DVD, or you can get SARDU to create it for a bootable USB drive. Basically, this aims to eliminate the need to carry around heaps of different bootable CDs.

Despite having “Antivirus Rescue Disk utility” in its name, it is not limited to just running Antivirus boot CDs. You can also include other tools like GParted, Ophcrack, UBCD4Win and various Linux live CDs.

The creator of this application is also a member of the Technibble community so if you have any feedback or suggestions, he is likely to read it.

Once you have done that, press either the “Make ISO” or “Make bootable USB” button and it will check to see which ISO’s you have placed in that directory, then create a single ISO.

If you chose “Make ISO”, it will place the single ISO in a folder called “ISO created” below the application folder. If you chose “Make bootable USB”, it will ask which drive letter the USB drive is and place the files there.

Note: Due to the hacking nature of some of the rescue CDs you might download, they might set off your antivirus software. This is most likely a “false positive”.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 3.01mb

More Information (Scroll down for English text)

Windows 7 Problem Step Recorder – Create Step By Step Recordings

A big problem for computer technicians is trying to reproduce the error that the client is encountering. If we don’t know exactly what they did to cause it, it is hard to track down the problem. This is where an application built into Windows 7 called “Problem Step Recorder” can help.

Windows 7 Problem Step Recorder will record the steps that either you or your client take that will eventually result in a certain computer problem. Once you have finished recording the steps, it outputs each step as a screenshot and puts them in an MHT document (webpage). It will also include a text only description of the steps down the bottom of the page. It will then place all the contents of this recording into a ZIP file so that it can be easily emailed.

You could also use this application to create a step-by-step guide for your client on how to do a certain tasks like burn a CD, get pictures off the digital camera and more.

Downloads:
To use it, Goto Start “Menu > Run” and type: psr

UnDBX – Recover Emails From Outlook Express Databases

UnDBX is a small, portable and freeware application designed to recover emails from Outlook Express databases.
Outlook Express databases can be vulnerable to corruption for many reasons, but the main one is when the databases become very large. Once it corrupts, Outlook Express will not be able to use the database and therefor it will be difficult to recover the emails it contains.
UnDBX will take the individual emails in the database and export them as .EML files which you can then open one by one.

To use this application, select the folder where your Outlook Express .DBX files are located (this is usually filled out for you) and then select the folder you would like to extract the .EML files to. Just press the Extract button and you are on your way.

Note: This tool will not work on Windows Vista or 7 as both of those use “Windows Mail” rather than Outlook Express. Having said that, you probably are more likely to encounter a database that got corrupted from Outlook Express since to grow to that size the client is usually using it for years.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 45kb

7 Sites With Laptop Teardown Guides & Other Laptop Repair Resources

There is a huge percentage of Computer Technicians out there know how to fix both laptops and desktops. However, the problem with repairing laptops is getting them apart. There are often screws hidden under stickers, special clips that need to be squeezed in a certain way and usually the laptop needs to be disassembled in a certain order.

Of course, it helps if you have a Service Guide to show you how to get the laptop apart; but they are sometimes difficult to get. For example, Apple only allows their service manuals to be viewed by AASP certified businesses/technicians and other brands guard their service manuals fairly closely as well.
Because of this, I have created this small list of sites where you can obtain Laptop teardown guides.

Official Sources
These are some of the manufacturers that actually share their tear down guides. The majority do not.

Many of these links contain other information about the laptop (drivers, specifications etc..), so look for either the “Maintenance Guide” or “Service Guide” on these pages.

Dell Laptops

HP & Compaq Laptops

Toshiba Thinkpad Laptops

Other Sources

Tims Laptop Service Manuals – Large list of laptop repair manuals. Scroll about 1/4 down the page to see the manuals.
Large list of laptop repair manuals

Inside My Laptop – Guide on how to replace various laptop parts.

EServiceInfo – A large (somewhat unorganised) archive of service manuals.

IFixIt – IFixIt has teardown guides for Apple computers, PCs and many other consumer electronics.

Of course, if you want to know how to repair laptops (brand unspecific) then I highly recommend Podnutz’s Laptop Repair Videos.

Beep Codes Viewer – Quickly Look Up What Beep Codes Mean

LAN Speed test is a small, portable application designed to quickly and accurately test LAN speeds. There are two versions, version 1.1 is free for any type of use where version 2.0 is $5 per commercial license but it can be used on unlimited computers. The older v1.1 is slower and has less features, but to just test LAN speed it is just as good as v2.0.

The way it works is that it writes a fairly large file, the default is 100mb but you can choose, to a system across the network. It then clears the windows file cache to keep read times from being skewed too high, reads the file back, clears the cache again, deletes the file, and displays the results.

The application is very portable requiring no install and it doesn’t change the registry. Version 1.1 works on Windows 98SE and up and version 2.0 works on Windows 2000 and up.

If you need the features in v2.0, $5 is a very reasonable price. Extra features include:

• Very Fast! Most tests are less than 1 minute
• New window that displays progress bar and allows user to cancel at any time
• New Open/Save option to .csv file
• Individual profiles automatically saved to .ini file to remember all settings
• Selectable Speed Measurements
• Command Line Mode (Allows network administrators to start the test from the client’s workstation and view the automatically generated .csv file from anywhere on the network)

Screenshots:

Downloads:

Download from Official Site – 58.5kb (v1.1), 357kb (v2.0)

CDBurnerXP – Free Full-Feature Burning Software

CDBurnerXP is a freeware, portable burning application designed to burn CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and HD-DVDs. Its license offers free commercial use as well as private use.

Many free burning applications are short on features or turn out to only be annoying trials but CDBurnerXP is truly free and has plenty of features including creating/burning ISOs, audio CDs, bootable disks, Lightscribe integration, and command line options. It also doesn’t require admin privileges, unlike Nero.

There are two versions, the full-install version and a portable version. Despite what the name suggests, it works on a lot more than XP; supported Windows versions are 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista/2008/Win7 (x86 / x64).

Screenshots:

MessenPass – Recover Lost Instant Messenger Passwords

Ddrescue is software tool used for data recovery. Ddrescue will copy data from one device such as a hard drive or cdrom, to another device (internal or external) and tries to rescue data in case of read errors. It is available as a stand-alone bootable cd or as part of a multi-boot/recovery distro package such as SystemRescueCd. Ddrescue is licensed under the GNU general public license and is completely free to use.

Ddrescue is quite a powerful recovery tool that can recover data in spite of bad sectors and disk errors. You can stop and resume its activity at any time as the logfile will keep track of progress and reduce redundant scanning, making to process very efficient. It can also merge multiple damaged copies of a file or disk to enhance the chances of 100% recovery.

This means that if you have two or more copies of a cd or hard drive, and all the copies are damaged to some extent, Ddrescue will be able to piece together the good data from each copy, resulting in a more complete recovery. When you run it on the same output file, it tries to fill in the gaps without wiping out the data already rescued.

In general Ddrescue is a great tool to have when dealing with files, hard drives, or cd-roms that are damaged or have lost data.

Screenshots

Downloads

Guest Post by Ric Chapman.

I think I’m somewhat safe in saying that Windows Phone 7 arrived late to the game and is still very much the underdog in today’s smartphone market. But whilst Microsoft are busy playing catch up their hard work is slowly paying off as it starts to carve its place among the Android, iPhone and Blackberry competition. Its ease of use and excellent integration into the Microsoft ecosystem is what’s starting to make it popular among home, business and now the technical community alike.
Having said that there’s still a bumpy ride ahead, at the time of this writing there are only 45,000 apps in the market place compared to Apple’s 500,000! When the phone was released, Technician apps were practically non-existent. I know, I was there, eagerly looking for what I could use out in the field. I didn’t find much, and what I did find didn’t work.. at all. But thankfully today is a much different story and I bring you the apps that I’m using on an almost daily basis as a Computer Technician.

Lync 2010

Lync 2010 arrives on time as promised and is an excellent app for staying in touch with colleagues, clients and family whilst on the move. Although it integrates nicely with the OS it would have been nice to see something similar to the Messenger integration deployed with Mango, but I’m just nit-picking. It’s a great app and although the app is free, you do require access to a Lync server. Mine comes courtesy of Office365, it just works and works well.
Price: FREE – Lync server required
Link

My Home Server

I absolutely love this app and is a must for anyone who owns their own or installs and maintains home servers for their clients. You can connect to any Home Server whilst you’re on the move allowing you to check important notifications, disk space, access files and manage user accounts including user creation and password resets. If your clients are happy for you to have access you can monitor and provide basic support from wherever you are at a touch of a button.
Price: FREE
Link

My Business Server

Almost identical to the My Home Server app with a focus on Microsoft Small Business Server Essentials only, would have been nice to have seen this for the SBS Standard but perhaps something will arrive later down the line. The SBS Essentials edition is the server of choice for my small business clients and as a support app is indispensable. The Live Tile only adds to my excitement by providing an instant indication of available disk space and the number of important / critical alerts you have pending right on the phones home screen.
Price: FREE
Link

Sky Wallet

Sky Wallet is a powerful password management app and I would be lost without it especially as clients are increasingly becoming reliant on their support techs for remembering their account details. Where Sky Wallet shines is its integration with SkyDrive, your details are synced and encrypted on your SkyDrive storage. If you need to reset your phone, you needn’t worry about losing the data. Secondly there’s a desktop companion app which comes included with this app allowing you to access your passwords directly from your PC avoiding the need to move back and forth between your desktop and phone.
Price: £2.99 / $3.99
Trial Available: Yes
Link

Flashlight 7

The flashlight tool is a very easily overlooked app and I’ve simply lost count on how much I’ve used this, I often find myself under a dimly lit desk or a dark comms cupboard. As I’m always carrying my phone, it makes sense not to be carrying a torch. There is a large array of flashlight apps which offer a variety of features so do shop around.
Price: FREE
Link

Subnet Calculator

Any technician working with medium and larger businesses should already know how to do this sort of thing without a calculator. But who would want to? We all work to a schedule and unless you can do this sort of thing in your head in less than 10 seconds then you might as well reach for your pocket. There are plenty of calculators out there, this one works great and has the added bonus of being free.
Price: FREE
Link

Connect Anything

The title of the app can be a little misleading and is simply a reference tool. I specifically use it for the Ethernet Pinout information when making up my own network cables.
Price: FREE
Link

Remote Desktop

Whilst there are plenty of remote desktop tools out there this is by far my favourite, not the cheapest but the one I generally get the best performance from overall. Most of these apps come with free trials and I’d recommend you try them before making a final decision.
Price: £4.99 / $5.99
Link

Amazon Kindle

Being a Kindle fan I downloaded this app the moment it became available and whilst I do read for pleasure, a lot of my reading also involves tech or reference books. Whilst not strictly a technical tool it can be a great informational tool avoiding the need carry the large books that plague most students and technicians. A quick and easy EBook reader on the go.
Price: FREE
Link

Network Tools

A small collection of network connectivity tools providing ping tests, tcp port connection tests, http and https connectivity tests as well as the ability to save a selection of URI’s for periodic checking, useful if you’re wanting to check the health of multiple web sites quickly. It’s absolutely free if you don’t mind the adverts which are not intrusive.
Price: FREE with ads or £2.29/$2.99 for the ad free version
Link

The SSH Client

A very simple and free SSH client that works brilliantly, the paid version comes with telnet support and a ton of customisation and configuration settings.
Price: FREE or £2.49/$3.49 for the PRO version
Link

IP Camera Viewer

I find these are quite popular tools among the tech community so I’ve included my favourite, originally acquired to keep an eye on my home office as I struggled to find anything that I was certain I had left on my desk. Turns out wife likes to clean my desk …. a lot. IP based cameras provide an excellent option for security and this app extends their use allowing you to keep an eye on things whilst on the move.
Price: FREE
Link

As mentioned previously, the Windows Phone integration with Bing and the Live services are what helps this phone stand out among its peers and may play a large part in its future success. The following items are not apps but integrated features within the OS that work exceptionally well and can prove invaluable whilst out in the field.

Office Hub

The Office hub provides excellent mobile office apps including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the ever popular OneNote. I live in OneNote and much prefer this to carrying around a notebook and pencil, an excellent note taking app regardless of your situation.

Maps

Finding new addresses is always a daunting task but Bing Maps makes the whole process a lot easier, I did have concerns about how it would stand up against Google Maps on other smartphones but I needn’t have worried. If you have a phone holder in the car it even serves well as (very temporary) sat-nav replacement provided that there is decent data coverage of course. Mileage is presented to the user but is not recorded so I use OneNote to take down mileage and the phones multi-tasking features make it easy to flick between the two apps.

Office 365

Microsofts cloud based service Office 365 was made for Windows Phone, whether you need an Exchange based email service, SharePoint file access then you simply cannot go wrong. Email access is powerful and SharePoint makes easy work of file collaboration with colleagues and clients. Office 365 is beyond the scope of this article but I do urge you to check it out.

SkyDrive

Cloud based file access with SkyDrive is simple and easy and was a missing key feature in the original release. I now store all my client notes and access them from the cloud whilst onsite where necessary using the free SkyDrive service.

Kon-Boot is software which allows you to bypass a Windows or Linux password by temporarily modifying the kernel. This is great for those times when you are working on a client’s pc but forgot to ask for the password. Kon-Boot is one of the simplest programs I have ever used, and it works very well. Simply burn the iso and boot into Kon-Boot. It will automatically load and then start the Windows boot process. When you get to the login screen click on any user and hit enter and you will log into the desktop, no matter how strong of a password was used.

The process does not change, modify, or delete the user password, it simply bypasses it by temporarily modifying the kernel. When you are done take out the cd and reboot or shutdown. The user login will again require a password and won’t log in unless it’s provided. It’s that simple.

Kon-Boot is free for personal use on the original developer’s website, but the version is no longer being maintained. Maintained personal use licenses and commercial use licenses can be purchased from Kryptoslogic.

Personal Use: $15.99 -Perpetual License
Commercial Use: $75.99 -Perpetual License

License Information:

Personal Licenses receive 6 months support and free updates. Commercial Licenses receive 12 months support and free updates. Each purchase entitles the end user or entity to one user license. This license is not subscription based and does not require renewal.

A perpetual personal license can be used solely by the named person who purchased it. License transfer and concurrent usage are prohibited. Personal licenses purchased by a company are invalid. If you are the only person planning to use the license, then the Personal License is for you.

Perpetual Commercial Licenses are available to a developer within a company or organization, requiring the software for general commercial use. Commercial Licenses registered to a legal entity allow for use of the software on any computer, operating system, and by the registered user within the legal entity. The provided total number of concurrent users cannot exceed the number of purchased licenses.

Tested Operating Systems

Microsoft Windows:
Windows Server 2008 Standard SP2 (v.275)
Windows Vista Business SP0
Windows Vista Ultimate SP1
Windows Vista Ultimate SP0
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise
Windows XP
Windows XP SP1
Windows XP SP2
Windows XP SP3
Windows 7

Linux:
Kernel Grub
Gentoo 2.6.24-gentoo-r5 GRUB 0.97
Ubuntu 2.6.24.3-debug GRUB 0.97
Debian 2.6.18-6-6861 GRUB 0.97
Fedora 2.6.25.9-76.fc9.i6862 GRUB 0.97

Initial Splash Screen

Kon-Boot Loading

Just hit enter without a password and you will log in!

Download from Developer’s Website
Commercial Downloads from Kryptoslogic

Inside an Apple Technicians Toolkit

Lion/Snow Leopard Boot USB

Usually, when your client’s computer won’t boot into the OS the CD drive won’t work. Either a CD will be stuck inside and you can’t eject it, or you can’t insert a new CD as the system won’t recognize it. This is why I always bring a Bootable USB drive with either Snow Leopard of Lion on it. When you insert it in your client’s computer, you can hold the “Option” key (ALT key if you are using a non-Apple keyboard) while you boot the Mac and select your USB drive. To create this USB Key, you need your original Lion installation file or your Snow Leopard CD and use the Disk Utility application on your Mac. (http://www.cultofmac.com /105527/how-to-make-a-bootable-install-disk-of-mac-os-x-lion/)

Snow Leopard CD

I always bring the Snow Leopard CD. Sometimes you won’t need a USB drive as CD Drive will work just fine. If you install this version on your client’s Mac, you do not need a serial number.

Dust Blower

No matter what I do on my client’s computers, I always use the Dust Blower at the end of the job. It adds a professional touch to it and usually the client has never removed the dust. Here in Montreal, I always buy the DustOff Original Duster. You can buy a 10 pack of those for just $12.99.

Knopixx CD

Incredible tool that lets you boot in a complete Unix environment directly on the CD. You can access the hard drive and backup files. This is really helpful if the OS does not boot and you want to backup your client’s files. You simply need to insert this CD and an external drive to backup everything. (http://www.knoppix.net/)

Universal Drive Adapter

This will let you repair your client hard drive directly from your computer. You remove the hard drive from your client’s computer, plug it into this device, and access it via usb from your machine. This tool is good to repair disk permissions, backup files and to completely clear a hard drive. It works perfectly on both Mac and Pc. You can buy this one here: http://www.ifixit.com/Apple-Parts/Universal-Drive-Adapter/IF107-108

ProTech Base Tool

When you try to open your client’s Apple Computer and either change the RAM, remove the hard drive or change the motherboard, you will always have to deal with an unusual screw. Apple does it on purpose so nobody can open/fix their machine except them. You really need to bring all the tools necessary to remove all the pieces for your needs. I use this set of tool created by ifixit: http://www.ifixit.com/Tools/Pro-Tech-Base-Toolkit/IF145-072
It has everything you need to repair iMacs, Macbooks, MacPros, iPhone, iPod Touch etc.

RAM Memory

Sometimes, when you try to boot the computer and you hear one or two beeps, the RAM failed. I always bring extra RAM to test this issue and to sell it to my clients if this is the problem.

External USB Hard drive

I bring my pocket 1TB external hard drive for backup. (model no. WDBACZ0010BBK-NESN). Usually your client won’t have another drive to back up his files. I like this HP drive because it is Mac/PC compatible and it supports USB 3.

USB Key

I bring my 4gb USB key that includes all the free software Mac offers. I always install all of them on my client’s computer. I know this is personal but up until now, my clients love it! This usb key includes:

• Google Chrome
• VLC
• OpenOffice
• AppCleaner
• iStatPro

Suction Cups

The iMac is the most difficult machine in the world to change its hard drive. Why? Because you have to remove the huge front glass. The only way of doing it is with suction cups. I only bring those if my clients have a problem with an iMac. http://www.ifixit.com/Tools/Heavy-duty-Suction-Cups-Pair/IF145-023

Magnifying glass

I usually use this on Macbook’s problems. When you have to change the trackpad, keyboard, motherboard etc. http://www.ifixit.com/Tools/Helping-Hands/IF145-082

Kensington Contour Pro 17″ Nylon Laptop Case

I can easily fit all of those things in this bag. I also always bring my 15” Macbook pro in it. http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/product/kensington-contour-pro-17-nylon-laptop-case/10040886.aspx?path=28ee4468307abdf19cb8fdcfbaa5cd56en02


These are my main tools that usually cover everything I need. Whats in your Mac technician bag?

Have you ever dreamed of installing a fresh copy of Windows on a client’s system that already includes the product key, timezone, regional settings, updated drivers, applications, and even your own branding? No need to enter anything during the installing, just set it and forget it. When you come back, the system is ready to go.

Installing or re-installing Windows, while not terribly difficult, can be time consuming. The Windows 7 installer has sped up the process a bit, but during any installation of Windows there are points when the install stops and ask the user/technician for input. This can be to set the timezone, keyboard settings, and language, to setting up the initial users. However, these screens pop up somewhere in the middle of the install and if you aren’t there to input the data, the install cannot continue. This means that the technician must either wait at the PC until the entire process is finished, or keep checking periodically to see if the install is asking for input. Either way is not very efficient for the technician since an install of Windows can take normally take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour.

This is where the Window OEM Pre-Installation Kit (OPK) comes in handy. Currently the Windows 7 OPK is available to help OEM’s quickly deploy Windows 7 installations. The kit allows a technician to customize and automate the installation process, basically creating an image with an answer file that allows an unattended installation.

You can use pre-installation kits for the following applications:

• Windows 7 with Service Pack 1
• Windows Vista with Service Pack 1
• Windows Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1
• Windows Server 2008
• Small Business Server (SBS) 2011
• Windows Server
• Microsoft Office
• Internet Explorer
• Microsoft Security Essentials
• Windows Live Essentials

The OPK is mainly designed for large deployment environments or system builders that need to install Windows quickly on many new machines. However, having this kit available is a major time saver for any tech that needs to install Windows frequently. Even a simple pre-loaded Windows image that you can install unattended will save you time in not having to wait for prompts and installing updates after the install.

The Contents of the Windows 7 OPK:

OPK Benefits

• Saves time and money because by automating installation and recovery.
• Lets you add your company branding to the operating system.
• Allows you to test pre-installed PCs without interrupting the pre-installation process.
• Supports all processes and scenarios, from the largest multinational Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to the smallest system builder.

For information, technical documents, instructional videos, and downloads check out the Microsoft OEM Pre-installation Kits Info Page.

The Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK)

The Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) is very similar to the OPK. The OPK is generally intended for system builders where the AIK is intended for corporate volume installs. The terms and licenses are also slightly different for each one, so be sure to read through and choose the kit that is more beneficial for your use.

AIK vs OPK Comparison

AIK Download

AIK Readme