A+ Tools

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are not for A+ technicians this is a very good tool this is called a butt set it's for when you're dealing with telephony it has nothing to do with when you're dealing with a plus stuff so we're gonna be talking about what tools you need in your bag today for the A+ technician as an A+ technician what tools you should have in your bag so that you go out there you buy the right things and then you also don't go out and over buy things this is one of the faiths this is one of those piece of advice I will try to bang into your head one of the biggest problems I see with with new technology professionals and especially new entrepreneurs is that they over invest in themselves essentially they get so excited right think think about it for a second I think about it for a second fioor gotta be a new technician if you're gonna start a business what's more fun and exciting buying tools buying devices looking over spec sheets or sitting there and studying for tests is a thing hey here's the thing studying studying is going is what's going to make you a good technician buying crap is simply fun and so I will warn you about this because I've seen it time and time again is so many times people will buy the book or they'll watch the videos they'll get a little bit through it and then they'll go on a shopping spree for some reason cuz it gets really excited oh when I'm an A+ technician when M&M CSE when I'm a CCNA and they go out and they spend thousands of dollars on stuff that they never end up using because they never get to the level where any of the equipment actually makes sense so one of the things that I will tell you is a when you're starting out go truly truly go inexpensive buy the best quality equipment that you can but buy is little of it as you can essentially go out there and buy a very good set of screwdrivers Hey inexpensive screwdrivers will cost you $4 good screwdrivers will cost you $12 I'm telling you to go out there and splurge on $12 worth of screwdrivers not not twelve hundred dollars worth of a fancy laptop if you get my drift there so we're gonna be talking about the tools today what you should reasonably expect to need and need to buy in order to be an A+ technician and again talk about some of the reasons why you should buy certain equipment and not by others so the first thing that you're going to need to be an A+ technician is a tool bag I don't care what tool bag it is but basically it should be a tool bag that you are going to be comfortable taking with you everywhere so this was my initial tool bag I spent the kingly sum of money of absolutely nothing for this when my stepfather was still alive yeah you know is one of those things as I would that's kind of nice so if you look at it basically he was in the Navy and this is just an old I think it's a navy neat little Navy tool back then you can pick one of these things up at an army navy surplus store for about twelve bucks and it's really you need nothing more complicated than this basically what you need for your your tool bag is you need something relatively small something relatively easy to be able to take with you that can fit however much crap you need now again with me oh you lie Eloy the computer guy after 20-some odd years this is not the same kit that I would use anymore I would probably have a full-fledged your backpack nowadays with all my tools and stuff in it just because again I do Network I do networking stuff I do telephony stuff I do other things other than the A+ stuff but like to be clear this is what I started with and again when I say do not over invest in yourself in the beginning honestly when I started out way back when I was putting out pull-tab signs and I I did not want to create a business I simply wanted to pay for beer money literally I had this bag I had one like a multi-headed screwdriver inside and I had a book of CDs so the you know back in the day cuz you know this was back there in Windows XP era so I had like rips of variations of different operating systems on there and a thumb drive and that was the sum total of what was in this bag so again when I say don't over invest in yourself I really do mean it get exactly what you need because literally I was able to start my business that way right I was way back when when I first started I was charging $50 an hour and literally my business entire business was this bag with a screwdriver a couple of CDs and a thumb drive in there so really that's what you need to start but the big thing with this the big thing with your little tool bag and again why it needs to be big enough for you is at the end of every day all tools need to be going back into your bag one of the problems with new technicians I completely understand as you pull you pull tools out of your bag you put them all over the place the problem is then you go to a client site or you have even you go to it to a user's desk and then you realize oh I need X Y or Z and you don't have it with you if you put all of your tools into your bag and every time you go to a service call you just crap you just grab your bag and take it with you then you'll be fine one of the techniques that I use honestly like when I had the bag when I had more tools than those couple tools I would just sort of literally have my bag open I would have it on my desk and then I would be able to arica into it and grab whatever I needed and that worked for me so the first thing that you need the first thing that you need is a good durable tool bag that you're willing to take with you everywhere now the first tool that you'll need is a screwdriver so back in the day when I when I originally had my screwdriver I went out I bought one of those like multi-headed things and I used that for a few years but actually I have found as time has gone by I much prefer a nice little set like this from cobalt where instead of having multiple heads for one single screwdriver you just have a number of different screwdrivers in the kit so if we go over we take a look at my little my little desk top shot here you can see that this is this is the kit that I now use and this is my my daily driver of screwdrivers I suppose you could say again not multi headed but individual screwdrivers so you'll see this is like a Phillips screwdriver and it's a large head so if you're trying to take out screws and a normal a normal size computer that's your phillips screwdriver here plus it's got a Torx it's got the Torx head this is a large Torx head then you've got flat head in here and then you have multiple sizes right so this is the large flat head if you need it this is the medium flat head if you need it and this is the the small flat head if you need it and what's nice about this is you get the full sizes that you need in order to be able to do your work again like like if you're dealing with torques you know once you get to the point where you're gonna be opening up laptop computers you're gonna be needing smaller smaller things so if you're dealing with torques you got the nice large one here so this is what you would use maybe to open up a laptop case and then you got a smaller one here this might be to get smaller smaller parts out of a laptop and then you got the tiny one somewhere no that's not it where's this where is the small Torx yeah yeah there we go this then you got the tiny Torx here and this tiny Torx is for getting into those really small little screws and for me I just you know again it's one of those all of this kind of stuff is personal preference but over the years I have just found having a nice little kit like this for for my screwdrivers is a lot better than having that single screwdriver with the multi head and you got to flip the heads around I just again as things go this is the one that I personally prefer this is from cobalt I think you can get the this particular set at Lowe's again 1215 dollars one of the things I'll say with even things like screwdrivers is again remember quality matters this is the type of tool they're gonna be using day-in day-out especially as an A+ technician and so simply having like these these are like rubberized handles here so they act they they feel comfortable to use I know for a lot of people that sounds like a joke but again day and day yeah you're gonna be using this thing so much simply having tools that are comfortable use and it has like a little spinny thing on the back so I can hold on to this so I can put this down and when I'm screwing right I can do this I can do that that's why you pay the extra money is this just those additional little things that make your life easier again if you use a screwdriver once a week go for the cheap thing it doesn't matter if you're gonna have tools that you're gonna be using day in and day out having nice handles having a little spinny thing on the back having good quality you know screwdrivers really makes your life a lot better now past the screwdrivers one of the things that you're going to want is a nice little USB optical drive especially as an A+ technician if you're dealing with equipment that that's that's you know a little bit older than than anything that's been put out in last year or two optical drives are very very useful things you don't know how many you don't know how many laptops you need to reinstall an operating system and hey guess what it doesn't have an optical drive actually installed a laptop or whatever so you're gonna need one of these things in order to be able to reinstall the operating system so having a little portable optical drive this is gonna cost you about 30 bucks maybe probably cost you less than that nowadays you can use this again for legacy software so if the company that you you're with uses old office software or old AutoCAD software there's just a lot of software out there that uses optical drives and so having an optical drive is invaluable literally the reason that I have this I have never used this for personal use this is the actual old archaic thing that I bought back in the day in order to be able to do repair work and it's come in handy time and time again so this is just one of those things if you're gonna be dealing with anything before the Windows 10 era make sure you get yourself a nice little USB optical drive the next thing that you should go for is canned air canned air this will cost you about 3 bucks or at least it cost me about 3 bucks yesterday and the thing is when you go and you're gonna get into computers you're gonna start messing with computers what you find out is a lot of the computers are completely disgusting inside and in order to clean out some areas you need canned air so I know some people are eco nowadays and like Eloi Eloi canned air is an ecologically sound or whatever the issue is is that when you open up computers where a lot of crap gets stuck is in the heatsink area so the cpu heatsink the GPU heat sink in the fans and all that kind of thing and the fact of the matter is you just can't clean out that crap unless you use canned air and so you just need a little bit can air you go in there you spritz things out and this this this fixes a lot of problems again I I have seen in the real world so many problems with computers are because of heat issues basically the either the heat sink on the CPU or the GPU is all gummed up you go in there you clean it out and wow that quick the computer is working good so three dollars four dollars or whatever it is for a thing a canned air you should always have some canned air with you you don't have to overuse it you don't have to overuse it before the right situations it's absolutely necessary especially to like with things like laptops and all that kind of thing yeah canned air is just a must-have anymore the next thing that you should have in your tool kit is a hard drive dock again invaluable for things like data recovery so basically what you can do is you go into either a laptop computer or a desktop computer you yank out that beautiful SATA hard drive what you can do is you can slot that into a dock like this this has a USB connector that will go back to your laptop computer and you can go in and you can grab files and folders so easily so easily right so there's sometimes again I we used to get paid a lot of good money for doing data recovery and when you do that or you know when you think about data recovery a lot of times do you think about hundreds of gigs of data video files huge number of pictures X Y or Z well in the real world in the real world what you find out is a a data recovery is literally one or two folders that probably have less than a gig if data right a lot of grandmas a lot of grandpas a lot of users they'll have one folder with Word documents or one folder with a few pictures in there and so if you have to do a wipe or reload on a computer especially if it's infected with viruses or got other problems it can be a real pain in the ass so try to get that data off well here's the thing if all you do if you crack open the case the computer you pull out the hard drive you shove it into this you connect this up to your laptop you pull off that one file or folder or the few things that they need you can then just plug this back into their computer do a wipe and reload and away you go so these these just oh I'm telling you these hard drive Doc's are absolutely beautiful it's great like back in the old days they didn't have hard drive docks so what I would do is I would actually rip apart hard drive enclosures and use those in order to do this with nice nowadays is they just sell hard drive docks so this is from a company called initech I actually like initech FTC compliance they sent me a lot of products over the years but they're very good they're very good quality I think this is like $15 for something like this has a USB 3.0 connection so again you've just got your power connector you got your USB 3 and you got a little power thing on there absolutely great for for the couple of bucks you're gonna spend on this thing this is one of those things that you absolutely should buy now this is for SATA so if you've got an old IDE hard drive that's where I would go back and basically I would go to something like new.i place someplace like newegg.com look for a hard drive enclosure just stick closure just the enclosure with an IDE interface I would then buy one of those again basically rip off the shell just take the nice little electronic components inside and that essentially creates one of these hard drive docks for you with an IDE interface the next thing that you need is a flash drive I really shouldn't say a flash drive you should probably have 10 flash drives what really depends on like what kind of work you're doing with desktop support if you're dealing with small businesses and if you're in the corporate world I would have about 10 flash drives if I was with like home users I would probably still have two or three and basically what these are for is as you can see this is like classic is a classic I should put this on eBay and try to sell it for $5,000 this is this is from what I have my company portable apps and utilities so what we would use these flash drives for is this is what we would put seek CC cleaner or C cleaner on back in a day we put recuva back on the day we put all the Adobe updates so any kind of like update service packs any kind of that normal software that you put on a computer you put on one of these little flash drives and so that allows you to be able to install from from local without having to go on the internet which can be very useful because you don't know what the speed of the Internet is gonna be for your clients or where you're going you don't know if the Internet is gonna drop off or whatever if you just have a few of these all stocked with your standard utilities you go to the computer you plug it in you do whatever it is you're gonna do and it makes a hell life a hell of a lot easier now especially the fact that you can basically get these things in Cracker Jack boxes again for me I remember in the old days when these things were like I spent like really expensive but seriously now like ten bucks five bucks apiece ten bucks apiece you can get these with getting like quite a few gigs of storage on there I would get a few of these figure out what the standard utilities you're gonna use are and then you just load each each one up with that and away you go absolutely invaluable this this this is and this is I say this is an old label from back when I had my store because this is something that we really really really did use day in and day out the next thing that you should have in your kit especially nowadays is a nice little portable hard drive so you can pick up like a one terabyte one of these Western Digital my passport dries probably for 50 or 60 bucks nowadays maybe even less than that and I would say this is definitely something that you should have in your kit now again if the heart if the operating system is completely crashed or it's just almost unusable pulling the hard drive out of a computer being able to recover data with a hard drive doc is a great way to go but you know what if you're dealing with a computer and the computer is more or less okay more or less doesn't have any issues with it but for some reason you need to pull the data off of it having a nice large harddrive portable hard drive drive makes your life easier so let's say you're doing a migration right so somebody has an old computer and they're trying to move to a new computer you just have this in your kit you pull it out you pull you you you copy all the the information from the old computer to the hard drive then you copy it to the new computer makes your life easier for a few bucks this is definitely something you should have it's not really a whole hell of a lot you can say about it just a nice little portable hard drive I would also say I would get the small hard drives nowadays just because they are nice and small like again like this you know if you get a if you get one of the large external hard drives it's gonna be about this big and the issue is it's not only is it large but then you've also got to worry about the power supply so you've got to plug this thing into the wall or if you've got a plug a larger one into the wall with this you just plug it directly into your laptop and it pulls the power off the USB so that's why I would go with a small one like this now the next one on the list and there will be no arguments young newb you will buy yourself a label maker you will buy a label maker say after me you will buy a label maker here's the deal here's the deal right you are going to have to be documenting a lot of things you are going to have to be labeling a lot of things right CDs flash drives whatever else like servers so if you go in I mean a plus I guess you're not really supposed to be dealing with servers but you may have to put like IP addresses on the outside of a computer like you put the IP address or you put the host name the computer name you put rather like information for the router on the outside of the router you burn CDs you burn optical discs and you need to label it and that is what you want to label label or for now I know what some of your gonna say no ill I know you why should I spend money on a label er and the stupid little cartridges that go in a label or because you don't understand Eli my handwriting is good my handwriting is good enough I don't need to buy a label er no no no it's not now it's not just kiss because your English teacher gave you an A does does doesn't mean your handwriting is actually any good labelers just make life easier because so many people think their handwriting is good and then they just scribble stuff out and it's impossible to read and it just makes life miserable it really does from a troubleshooting standpoint so you get yours again it's a little 15 dollar device cost a couple bucks for the cartridges you get one of these things every time you need to label something on a device or whatever you know the IP address the host name you burn a CD you use the label er it's nice it looks professional everybody can actually read what the hell it says you know you're not sitting there that going is that an eye or a one or an L you know because you can read it by a labeler I'm telling you just just by a label er the final standard thing that I would have in your little a plus kit would be a flashlight again you go out there you get a nice LED flashlight throw some batteries in there and the batteries last forever it's kind of funny like this flashlight itself like this flashlight is probably twelve years old and the batteries in here have probably been in here for like years and it's still nice and bright the reason why you should have a flashlight is normally doing like a plus level repairs you don't need a flashlight you should be able to pull out the computer and take a look in the computer and do whatever it is you're gonna be doing the problem is is a lot of times when you're going in and doing troubleshooting the computer will be under a desk or no it'll be in a dark area and you don't necessarily want to move it remember anytime you move a piece of electronics something may happen to electronics right sometimes you want to touch something as possible so you go onto the desk you get your little flashlight you turn on your flashlight and you see what's going on is is everything plugged in appropriately so on and so forth are the cables plugged in back to the network port so the network ports plugged into the patch kit patch panel again there if there is how infrastructure is supposed to be built and then there's infrastructure is built in the real world in the real world you really want an inexpensive flashlight you don't even have to get something as big as this you can even get a keychain flashlight like lo one of those $5 LED keychain flashlights just get some kind of flashlight it really will matter so these are the standard tools and what you really think of as tools that you're gonna be using as an A+ technician again nothing nothing overly complicated here all kinds of simple stuff because again your desktop support you're gonna be doing relatively simple stuff now beyond this beyond this this is where we can get into some of the things that are a little more expensive and so we're gonna talk about it but be careful before you go out there and start just going all wacky and buying expensive things now the next thing that you should have in your kit as an A+ technician is that you should have a laptop most likely I hate to say a Windows laptop yes yeah that's the operating system most people use here's what I'm going to tell you though you don't need the best laptop in the world you don't need a thousand-dollar laptop you don't need a five hundred dollar laptop honestly going to some place like Micro Center and buying a refurbished laptop that's like four or five years old is probably what you need to be clear to be clear you're an A+ technician you're not going to be playing video games on this laptop you're not gonna be doing machine learning and artificial intelligence on this laptop what you're gonna be doing on this laptop is you're gonna be pulling that off of one device and showing it unto another you're going to be checking to make sure that there is a wireless signal right you're going to be just going in you know seeing if you can get on the internet basic stuff like that so you don't need a super fancy expensive laptop I would highly honestly recommend against it one of the things you're have to be thinking about with this laptop is you're gonna be taking it with you in your tool kit when you go out to the clients site or to the to the user you know wherever the user is at and the thing is it's got to get banged around like any other piece of equipment right you know like this label maker I can beat the hell out of and I don't care because it cost like 15 dollars and I mean it's made like a playschool device well one of the things the other thing you know when you have the kit you're you're gonna be frustrated tired somedays and you're gonna drop your kit with you with everything in it right you're gonna bang it around you're gonna do things right and so if you got a thousand fifteen hundred dollar laptop and you're banging the hell out of that thing yeah how long is it gonna last right whereas again you go out there you get a two or three hundred dollar laptop you bang the hell out of it hey you break the motherboard you're gonna break the motherboard a certain appoint it's no big deal you're not you're not going to go bankrupt over that especially as a new weight loss technician the other thing that I will warn you about why I would suggest especially in the modern world you do not use your day-to-day laptop as your troubleshooting laptop is there there are viruses out there there's malware all that kind of thing you know when you're recovering data or when you're pushing and pulling other people's data what happens if the laptop they're using you're using gets infected with whatever the hell the other the other computers infected with right again if it's just your if it's your troubleshooting laptop if it's basically just to just another tool or utility then you wipe and reload you format the hard drive and away you go you don't think about it right here's the thing if that is your normal computer that you use for email and pictures and movies and this and that and the other thing and to get a severus on it you're gonna put yourself in the exact same position that user is in uh-uh now I've got a now I've got to go through all the troubleshooting and all that kind of thing not only that but also from a security standpoint again you know if you're using your normal day-to-day laptop I mean you're gonna be logging into email accounts or gonna be logging into all of your different accounts and what happens if you get a virus on there that's not detected by your antivirus software and somebody just starts stealing your credentials like why why are you going to risk that it just doesn't make any sense risk you know so just having it just just just a beat up beat up laptop that you don't care about is definitely the way to go can't go get a refurbished one for 200 bucks 300 bucks honestly anything that's been made since probably or 2010 it's gonna be fine for you for this eight plus level stuff so just by just by something like that use it for your work and and you'll be fun now the next thing to think about if you're gonna be an A+ level technician a desktop Support Technician is a smartphone with an unlimited data plan or at least a very large data plan right oh oh they thinks it only existed 10 years ago Oh what made my life a lot easier so one of the issues that you're gonna run into you know if you're in the enterprise environment if you're in the business environment this isn't a big deal you shouldn't worry about this really but if you're going out there to client side let's say you're a field technician or you're a consultant you're going out to client sites what I have found is the Internet has the the worst habit of going out when you need it the most right so you go and you're you're sitting down you're gonna you're gonna configure a laptop or you're gonna you're gonna configure somebody's computer and you find out oh the reason that it's not working properly is it doesn't have the latest updates well if they're connected to the Internet you just download the latest updates and it's fixed you will be surprised you'll be shot 80% of end-users problems where something doesn't work is because they're not updated to the latest whatever here's a problem their internet service is down or maybe something with a network is down where you're going to repair and troubleshoot then you're kind of screwed there's nothing you can do if you have a smart phone with an unlimited data plan then you can tether the device to your smart phone and away you go you can you can download weather updates you need and you can still get the work done now what I would say is with this if I was going to be doing this I would have the smart phone with the wireless tethering option again something like the iPhone or whatever else and then I would get a USB wireless NIC wireless network card for any computers that you would be connecting to your smartphone via tethering I'm a little concerned nowadays even if your smartphone can tether through physical USB connection again from a cyber security standpoint I are really nervous about connecting my phone directly to somebody else's computer there there are some interesting hacking stuff that that people have worked with with with trying to trying to hack smartphones that way and so I would much prefer the idea even if you have a desktop computer that only has a wired connection you plug in the wireless network card you then connect to your smartphone that way and then you pull the updates that allows you to be able to pull those updates wherever you're out with a little more protection for the smartphone again this is one of those things you have to decide if you're in the enterprise world don't worry about it if the Internet's not working your enterprise you've got bigger issues this is more for if you're going out to client site it's just an invaluable tool to have nowadays now the final things you should have in your toolkit as an A+ technician are what are called known good parts or known good components what are these known good parts are known good components basically these are parts that you know that they work right so when you go to troubleshoot especially something like a desktop it can be a little difficult to know exactly what's broken right so oh so let's say let's say there's no video showing up on the monitor right so if there's no video showing up on the monitor that could be that the monitor is broken that could be that the video card is broken that could be that the motherboard socket and I've seen this for the video card is broken or that can mean that the motherboard is broken right that's kind of hard to troubleshoot especially it's not like one of those things you go in there and see some IO settings and you know exactly what's going on so having known good parts makes life a lot easier for troubleshooting because basically you can just slap into no good parts and see what happens right so if the monitor is bligh you turn on the monitor and there's a little green light for the power but it's black and you have a known good monitor like I used to have a no good monitor my car when I did field stuff it was a small one like a small little guy so I would I would take to no good monitor and I would plug it in to to the graphics card right if it's still black and I know that's known good I know okay it's not the monitors problem so then I sit there and I look at is like huh so maybe it's the graphics card problem so then what I would do is I would take a known good PCI so a PCI graphics card so most graphics cards are PCI Express even back in the day and the question there is so I don't know if it's the the graphics card or the PCIe slot so what I can do is I could slot the PCI graphics card into to the to the motherboard and I could see if that works so if that then works and then I know it's either the graphics card or I know it's a slot if it's a PCI Express graphics card if I have an Edition one of those I could plug that in and see if that troubleshoots basically by having known good parts you can figure out what's going on that way like one of the times when I troubleshoot it again what one of my lessons about dealing with Dell about ten years ago is we had a whole pile of new Dell desktop computers come in and I was still new as a consultant I was still unsure of myself as a consultant so I plug in the this Dell laptop or this Dell desktop and trying to configure it to the network but the network's not working all right I'm sitting there so oh is it DNS settings DHCP settings oh my golly or like I'm racking my brain trying to figure out why the hell does this desktop computer won't connect to the network and so finally I get to the point life so I pull out the known good network card that I have in my toolkit I slot it into the brand new Dell computer and hey what do you know the network card was dead on arrival that came in that Dell computer literally sliding in the network card it's like oh you're on the network right now everything is good so with with the with with the known good parts things that I would say is think about having a known good power supply so a decent-sized power supply with all the connectors have a known good power supply that allows you to test is it the power supply that's bad or again is it the motherboard that's bad have known good video cards I'd have a PCI PC just the PCI video card yeah it's cheap its low-end but it'll output video I have a PCI video card nowadays I probably have a PCI Express video card too in the kit I would have I would have a NIC and a network interface card PCI network interface card so I could slot in I'd have a wireless network interface card so I could slot in maybe maybe USB for those you you have to figure out what your situation is and what kind of equipment you're gonna be using but having known good parts it just makes troubleshooting so much easier like huh I wonder if this bar it's broken slot yeah it works no good it's just it's like yeah so I could sit here and sit here for two hours and go through all the troubleshooting steps or I can yeah if that's a problem no good parts makes life so much easier so that's what we've got for the standard a plus toolkit these are the things that you should be thinking about buying again buy good quality tools just don't buy a lot of them right it's much better to spend fifteen dollars or whatever on a good set of screwdrivers first is spending $500 on a hell of a lot you know of low cost other things right by the good things that you need right now but I know some of you people like but Eli but Eli you had other things in your kits I want to see those other things so I will show you some of the other stuff that ended up in my kit over the years but to be clear this is not a plus level things this is like net plus and beyond stuff but it is that's the type of equipment that you should be thinking about getting as you go along because what you find out is when you're doing a plus troubleshooting a lot of times a plus troubleshooting goes into debt plus troubleshooting which then goes into things like telephony troubleshooting so you should have an idea about this equipment now but to be clear don't buy it now wait wait till we get to the net plus track and then I will show you some of these other things so let's take a look let's take a look at some of the other stuff that's in my kit so this this is what's called a telephone but set right here so basically what this is this is a fluke is this a fluke I think it's a fluke I like fluke fluke is good equipment fluke networks so what this is is basically you connect these two analog phone lines it allows you to listen to see if there's a dial tone and essentially more or less it's a phone so you can actually connect this right into the phone lines and then be able to dial a phone number or even be able to receive calls using this thing and basically this is what you use to make sure you know what's going on with telephone lines very useful again this was more this was really useful back in the days with like DSL and especially I did telephone stuff not as useful nowadays but you know if you spent a couple bucks you can have any a toolkit not a bad thing to have other than that you have things like your your network tester your network cable tester so what happens is you plug this into one end of a network cable you plug this side into another end of the network cable and then you can actually test the cable to make sure it tests out and it's doing what it's supposed to do again a lot of times where you find out oh my golly talk about like technicians screwing clients I have seen clients spend lots and lots and lots of money to have buildings or homes run with network cabling only for the person who ran the network cabling to not understand the wire pattern for how the cables were supposed to be punched down so although technically the cables went from point A to point B they were in fact unusable and so having a network cable testing kit like this makes life a lot easier for you again if you can't you can't connect to the network make sure that the cable itself is okay and you're not having some kind of other issues beyond that you know fun things like this this is a toning set so what you do with this is you can connect this little this little thing come on goddamn okay might have been look might be a little while since I've used this holy crap that's stuck in there that's not a joke come on come on I'm out live darn it holy what's wrong with this thing oh hey maybe been a while since I've used it oh there we go yes I use a Toni kit right so basically a Toni kit has two components you have this little this is the the thing that actually plugs in to a network cable so you can plug this into a port for a network cable you can plug this into a port for a telephone line you can plug this or you can connect to the alligator clips directly to wires and what this does is you put the power button on and it sends what's called a tone down the line you then use this little handheld device and this is able to detect the tone why this is valuable is you can even detect the wires through walls so again if you go into an office building you go to a home where all these wires have been run but you're not really sure where the hell they've been run to you can use these to actually be able to track down the individual wires this can be very valuable I've seen this again in business environments where you have network cable it goes back to a single patch panel guess what nobody labeled nobody labeled a patch panel so you go in there and you're looking at a 24 or 48 pork patch panel and you literally have no idea where any of those wires go you plug this into a pore in the patch panel and then you can go back and you can tone to figure out where those wires in the patch panel actually go into the building so that's what one of these things is used for very very valuable getting useful it's like 80 or 90 bucks bet right there past that then you have again four cabling you have your your cabling tools this is what's called a punch down tool so for the plugs that you connect the oh the connector the network cabling into you use this to actually punch the wires into it this is a nice ideal one it has a little hammer thing so you push on it really hard and it goes clunk and it pushes it in and cuts off the end these have these have little blades so if you ever see these and they sell additional blades this is for a 110 blocks this is a 110 block blade this this has a little cutty bit on one side this has the non cutty bit so that's a 110 block I don't know if I have a 66 block in here yeah there's another blade that does a 66 block I haven't dealt with sixty six blocks in quite a few years so I'm not even sure - Liz but that's that's basically we're talking about with a punch down tool and then you finally got the crimper the final tool again one of those things you should think about this is what you use in order to actually create the patch cables so you have your network cable you have a little into connector and this is what you use to squeeze it together and turn it into a patch cable very nice again this is another ideal ideal fluke and our good companies for this networking stuff for whatever reason so other things other tools you may think about if you're progressing down the net plus round so that's the clasp on a plus tools that's not an A+ tool here we go that's the clasp on a plus tools basically to give you an idea of the types of tools you will need as an A+ level technician again again buy small quantities of good equipment 21 here's the profession I will give you that advice also remember also remember a professional truly truly professional is not made by their tools a tools make a professional better but a professional is not the tools alone a professional as a professional the more knowledge you have in your head the more knowledge you have in your head and the more experience you have that is what is most vital I always like a quote I took Kempo for a number of years Kempo was an American martial arts created by Edie Parker and one of the quotes that I always always liked that he said I guess when he what whenever he went into a fight as he said was that I come to you with just my two hands and basically the idea of being a fighter all he needed hope you'll ass was his two hands right if you have a knife or gun or something else to bludgeon you with I mean he'll take it he'll accept it but really at the end of the day all I needed was his two hands - to make your day very bad and that's kind of how I would say you should think about being a technician is you should be able to walk into a situation and all you really need is your two hands and your brain right you should be able to walk into a situation and then you should be able to figure out how to solve the situation and go from there to many people that's what I say is is they sit here and they start reading this book or they start reading me mcse book and it gets really boring and it gets really tedious and gets really dry and so they go on a shopping spree the problem is is they buy a whole bunch of tools and equipment that they're never gonna use they spend a lot of money so they've run out of money so they don't have it on the things that they'll actually need to buy and then they don't really have anything in their heads either right because that's fun again buying stuff is fun buying stuff is exciting you can talk about buying stuff you can brag about buying stuff your friends and family understand buying stuff they don't understand this crap you don't understand this crap but you're never gonna understand this crap unless you study so by as little as possible by the highest quality stuff you can afford and go from there it really will make your life better so that's all I have on this class today again continuing this a-plus track getting a tiny bit more technical getting a tiny bit more technical don't worry don't worry we're getting close to the real technical stuff but again all of it all of this all of this I mean it's Soviets so funny like again having done this stuff for 41 21 years 22 years they're doing this stuff a long time right and that's the funny thing like going and thinking about this track and going and like really thinking about what's important and it's not until you know you're somebody like me and you're sitting there actually trying to write this stuff out where you realize it's it's what seems like the stupid stuff it's what seems like the no crap Sherlock stuff is actually what makes or breaks technicians the technicians that are made or broken it's based on how they communicate with clients it's based on you know making sure that they have the right tools and the tools or was available again it's making sure that tools are always available you can spend $10,000 on tools but if they're not within reach when you need them they might as well not exist it's all of these little things that you find really really either make a technician successful or not so I know some of this stuff some of this stuff might be seamless seem a little airy-fairy but I'm telling you haven't done this for a long time these these these initial a plus lessons I'm teaching you honestly may be the most valuable lessons I teach you out of almost any class on the website truly truly really truly anyways as always I enjoy doing this video and look forward to seeing with the next one I hope this video has been useful for you and you can use the information that I provided to go out and make the world a better place but please remember that I cannot pay my mortgage with passion it's true it's true I try to do it the other week and they were not amused here's a whole bunch of passion can I pay my mortgage with this and they said no so if you want to support what I do whether it's the videos that I do for you I the computer guy the videos I do for fail normal or even the in-person meet up we do every other week please think about joining fail normal calm or Eli the computer guy calm the end of the day you know all the passion in the world doesn't matter if you can't feed your family and so by supporting me by joining either of those two sites you help pay for everything that I try to create and allows me to not have to worry about things like sponsors or whatever insanity is currently going on with YouTube

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 29,413

Keywords: Eli, the, Computer, Guy, Repair, Networking, Tech, IT, Startup, A+, CompTIA, Net+, MCSE, MCSA, CCNA, CCNP, CCIE, DevOPs

Id: X3JTO4iGmxU

Length: 46min 46sec (2806 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2018