But nowhere near £150. Like someone said, laptops are so cheap now that by the time they break it's not worth spending hundreds fixing them.
Also, you would use the customers Windows key to keep it legal.
Computer store charges
- Thread starter Kohaashi
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But nowhere near £150. Like someone said, laptops are so cheap now that by the time they break it's not worth spending hundreds fixing them.
Also, you would use the customers Windows key to keep it legal.
Soldato
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But nowhere near £150. Like someone said, laptops are so cheap now that by the time they break it's not worth spending hundreds fixing them.
Also, you would use the customers Windows key to keep it legal.
But what about the office software they have installed but no longer have the license key for / never had. Office isnt exactly cheap to buy. When you add that onto the laptop cost. How about all their data not being there or having lots of programs not installed. For most on here having a clean windows install isnt a hassle, we know how to copy data reinstall programs etc but this isnt the same for everyone. With the economy the way it is, sometimes people cant afford to spend £400 on a new laptop + office etc so paying £100 to have their laptop fixed is the better choice.
Soldato
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Its called ghosting and they can do it because they will have like 1000+ computers which are EXACTLY the same.
I'm just thinking in terms of the small computer repair shop business model. If you could rebuild 3 laptops with an automated process requiring 1 man hour, it's far more efficient than spending 3 hours on each manually configuring each windows setting, all each individual app and every single driver. You could charge less per machine and create a larger customer base.
With XP, the key just has to match the OEMBIOS file set for that manufacturer (free and legal to download) so you'd just copy the OEMBIOS files for a Dell machine to the Windows folder.
Of course you have to keep your build images updated with patches but then you can just take a snapshot in VMWare (pre-sysprep), modify and save.
Computer repair is something I'd be tempted to do on the side but when I've done it in the past if I fixed someones computer once, they'd expect free IT support for life! I'm sure many of you have experienced the same.
With XP, the key just has to match the OEMBIOS file set for that manufacturer (free and legal to download) so you'd just copy the OEMBIOS files for a Dell machine to the Windows folder.
Of course you have to keep your build images updated with patches but then you can just take a snapshot in VMWare (pre-sysprep), modify and save.
Computer repair is something I'd be tempted to do on the side but when I've done it in the past if I fixed someones computer once, they'd expect free IT support for life! I'm sure many of you have experienced the same.
so you'd install the drivers required for every laptop ever made in your master image ??
Right. Okey Dokey.
Ghosting was used 5+ years ago. No self respecting large organisation is still using as basic as Ghost! It's all about the WIM files now (MS did something right!). And no, not all computers are the same in these companies. The place I'm in now has hundreds of machines and the same image is deployed to all of them.
Take their Office key off their machine using Magic Jellybean. If they don't have Office then they probably had MS Works, in which case they'd be better off with Open Office!
You can slipstream the drivers into a USB install stick. That's really about as much as you could do, as far as I'm aware. You could locally cache MS updates. You could even have a pack of portable apps ready to copy on.
But you don't have a steady stream of people coming to the shop looking for repairs and paying and leaving and not coming back.
You have problem customers, you have intermittent faults, you have tyre kickers, you have people who think you'll fix a laptop for a tenner.
But you don't have a steady stream of people coming to the shop looking for repairs and paying and leaving and not coming back.
You have problem customers, you have intermittent faults, you have tyre kickers, you have people who think you'll fix a laptop for a tenner.
Yep. They would be part of a driver pack that sits in the Drivers.WIM container. When you sysprep a machine and tell it where the drivers are it just installs what it needs by searching the inf files. There will still be some obscure ones that you have to install manually but these will be small in size - proprietary infrared or bluetooth drivers or something.
http://driverpacks.net/
Soldato
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But whos going to install this on their new laptop? they wont have the discs required to do that. If you / the computer shop does it, they are likely to charge you labour. The cheap option of a new laptop isnt so cheap anymore.
you still haven't addressed the software that gets installed with the laptop that the user might use. Dell / Toshiba / Acer etc.. all bundle shed loads of software with their laptops, apps that play movies, use the webcam for face recognition, etc...
Us techys are quite happy to wipe all that off and do without it, but what about when the end user wants all that crap back ?
In an enterprise environment, you can tell them to make do without it. But in retail you can't, they simply won't pay you.
I see what you mean. It would depend on what the customer wants and how much a replacement would cost. If they had loads of software that they would lose forever (and no discs) if they didn't keep then they're in deep doo doo if it breaks and there's not much they can do. Office is easy enough to do though.
The re-imaging model would probably only be used for average joe internet surfer who just has basic needs and no fancy software. But I suspect that would make up a large portion of the customers.
Of course I'd explain what my "cheaper" service offers but modern restore discs are so easy to use though that I still probably wouldn't charge them much if it didn't require more of my time. If they haven't got their restore discs then they'll have to make do with my image or go and find them!
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You have never working in PC repair have you........
3 laptops in 1 man hour! Try installing vista tomorrow from a sp2 disk then do all the updates....
I have a Win7 restore disk that takes just over 1 hour start to finish (installing from a USB drive) complete with Office 2010, all latest patches (as of Nov 2010) Avira, Adobe Reader, KMPlayer etc.
3 laptops at once = 1 hour.
edit: depends on the speed of the laptop of course.
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Associate
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Right ok....
"What about my pictures and music.."
So they have 20gb of music and pics, thats take longer than 1 hour itself to backup before you start! Thats for one laptop.
Every shop will charge more for extra work. Isn't that obvious? I was comparing 1 hour for the auto build with 3 hours for the manual build. So if you add the time to backup 20gb of music and pics you add it to both figures, 1.5 hours for the auto build and 3.5 hours for the manual.