Some people who are very good with computers like to keep that information on the down-low.

You know what we’re talking about. If word gets out that you can configure a network card, you can suddenly become your friendly neighborhood source for free tech support. If that’s you, maybe you can breathe a little easier now. Two former Hewlett-Packard geeks have dreamed up a way to offload all that tech support work to a $35 USB stick that’s loaded with a lightweight version of Linux and some nifty disk-clean-up tools.

The idea came to Pedram Amini and David Endler after they both left Hewlett-Packard a few years ago. After about a decade in the high-tech industry, they were both pretty darned good with computers, and they were used to being tapped for free tech support. “The basic idea came out of frustration,” Amini says. “When you’re a technical person, you’re constantly being asked to help people out with computer problems.”

For Amini and Endler, that could mean a few hours of tedious research, installing patches, configuring network connections, that kind of stuff. “All these things that we typically do, we wanted to put it on a stick and automate it,” he said.

They call their product Jumpshot, and they’re looking to get some Kickstarter funding to turn it into a business.

If you kick in $35 to help get them get funded, in November they’ll send you a cool-looking 8GB flash drive with their 200 megabytes of Jumpshot tools installed. Users boot their computer to the flash drive, and it launches a customized version of Linux, which connects with a Jumpshot internet service and proceeds to open a browser interface while it scans the computer’s hard drive for viruses, crapware and signs of misconfiguration.

Those who help with funding also get early access the Jumpshot service and get to try it for free (it will eventually cost money). But all this assumes that Jumpshot makes its Kickstarter goal of $25,000. So far, they’ve rounded up more than $11,000 in just two days.

There’s also a way to skip the USB drive and simply download and launch Jumpshot via the internet, Amini says.

The tricky part was to write a tool — not unlike those used in computer forensics — that could scan the disk and figure out what was going on without actually launching Windows. This means nasty viruses and rootkits will have a hard time hiding from Jumpshot. “We’re interfacing with the raw bytes on disk as opposed to interfacing though the operating system,” Amini says.

Other companies sell crapware removers, but Amini and Endler are coming at the problem from an interesting perspective. Before leaving HP in 2010, they’d spent close to a decade working in the professional bug-finding game. They both worked for companies like iDefense and TippingPoint that built a business out of uncovering vulnerabilities in widely used software and protecting their customers against malicious software that might try to exploit it.

That’s helped them build Jumpshot with what Amini describes as a security minded thought process. So Jumpshot can do smart simple things that can not only clean up a PC, but also help protect it against real world attacks.

Watch Amini and Endler’s Kickstarter pitch here: