So you have a Toshiba laptop that will not boot up because it has a black screen that says enter password but you did not set a boot password, what do you do? We have had several customers come into our shop with this problem. They were messing around in BIOS and when they restarted the laptop this is what they had. On older laptops you had to dis-assemble the unit to get to the CMOS battery but the newer ones have a reset jumper that will clear the password and return the laptop to normal operation. Read more

We are asked this question all the time – How do you clear a stuck print job? It happens to everyone that prints. You send a print job and it never prints, you try to delete it and it just says “deleting”, you try restarting the computer and still nothing. This problem first showed up in Windows XP but it still happens in Vista and Win7 so it’s not a new problem, and it happens on laser as well as ink printers. We are about to show you why this happens and how to clear the print jobs out. Read more

Do you do virus removal for friends and relatives? Would you like to have a great collection of malware removal and diagnostics tools that’s easy to carry. We are about to show you how to make a bootable USB flash drive with Mini WinXP and the HirenCD that has anti-virus/Malware apps, drive recovery apps, network diagnostics programs and many other useful programs. Everyone that does computer troubleshooting and support needs a flash drive like this. Read more

Ever since we published the review of the Zalman VE200 we have been getting emails asking for more information on the Driver Magician program. If you work on systems in a repair shop or even for friends then this piece of software would come in handy. Driver Magician allows you to back and restore device drivers with just a few clicks. We use the software almost every day when we rebuild customers system that are virus infected or when they have corrupted files. Read more

This is a very interesting device!! The Zalman 2.5″ Black Drive Enclosure w/ virtual drive is not your standard portable drive device. When plugged into a PC or Mac it shows as a hard drive and an optical drive. Just like any other drive case, when connected to your computer you can load and save data to the hard drive but you can also mount ISO images and actually boot to the image mounted in the virtual drive. Read more

If you need to help someone setup their Linksys/Cicso router but you are not in the same location sometimes it gets to be quite tricky trying to guide them from screen to screen if you can’t see what they see.  Linksys has provided the configuration pages in HTML format so you can move from screen to screen just as you would on a router. The files can be found at: http://ui.linksys.com/files/ You just find the product model you need, click the directory and then click the version number. You will be presented with a web page version of the router.

If you have to support users of family members this information can be very useful.