Being in the support industry is pretty much like a technician in a factory most times, except that we work on computers and technicians work on machines. As I see it, one of the common things between a support technician and other technicians is the usage of tools to fix problems. Support Engineers like me use software tools to troubleshoot problems. There are a ton of free tools out there on the internet that accomplish many tasks and provid valuable information to resolve computer related problems. My personal favorites are tools developed by Mark Russinovich, who, before joining Microsoft, wrote a lot of tools for the Windows platform. I use them every day in my job and without those tools it would be extremely difficult to scope and get to the root cause of the problem.