How much to Charge??

I can understand him wanting someone to install the OS but if he can't manage the Office install on his own your about to open a can of worms ;)
 
People are ignorant and mean about paying people to fix PCs. They think PCs are like fridges - buy use - end of story. They resent paying cash to keep the thing going. The same people pay 30-100 per hour to a garage to keep their cars going. People drop a PC with a problem in your lap and fter you have spent hours fixing it give you a £5 bottle of wine "for your trouble". Charge by the hour. Time what you do and be able to justify it. Tell the person your rates ar £15 per hour, £40 per hour or whatever. Ask them if they want to be phoned if the job starts getting expensive. Don't give your time, money and expertise away for for a few crumbs. Make sure the person knows your charging structure before you start work. They will probably go away and not come back - which is what you want really :) The key point is be be very certain in your mind what you want to sell an hour of your life, experience and skill for.
 
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EffBee said:
People are ignorant and mean about paying people to fix PCs. They think PCs are like fridges - buy use - end of story. They resent paying cash to keep the thing going. The same people pay 30-100 per hour to a garage to keep their cars going. People drop a PC with a problem in your lap and fter you have spent hours fixing it give you a £5 bottle of wine "for your trouble". Charge by the hour. Time what you do and be able to justify it. Tell the person your rates ar £15 per hour, £40 per hour or whatever. Ask them if they want to be phoned if the job starts getting expensive. Don't give your time, money and expertise away for for a few crumbs. Make sure the person knows your charging structure before you start work. They will probably go away and not come back - which is what you want really :) The key point is be be very certain in your mind what you want to sell an hour of your life, experience and skill for.
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Quoted for the truth! Well said EffBee.

I'll reiterate that it can easily take up to 3 hours to install and update an os. SPW you said it shouldn't, but it can and will if you have a big hdd and a slow broadband connection.
Then if you put say, office 2003 on and then have to update with the latest service pack 3, you're there for quite a spell, whether you can leave it running or not, you're job isn't done yet and you should charge for it.
I wonder how many of the posters here actually do this for a job.
I built a pc for a friend 3 years ago now. Didn't charge him a penny beyond the price of the parts, so i made nothing on it. didn't hear from him in all that time, then 2 weeks ago he rings me up up cos its broken.
To cut a long story short; with all the problems his pc had, i ended up reinstalling XP and Office 3 times. And after replacing the hdd, motherboard, doubling his ram and overclocking the cpu i charged him £60 for it. Which was profit for me as all the replacement parts were my old stock, but then he only had a 1300 Duron and did nothing but look at dating sites, lol.
See what a computer shop would have charged for that!
Don't sell yourself short guys, a monkey may indeed be able to install an os, but some folks can't and will/ought to pay for it.
Mechanics are called 'grease monkeys' but i pay these monkeys to fix my car, because i haven't a scooby doo what to do with it.
I don't charge much because i'm soft, but i flippin well should thats for sure.
 
EffBee said:
People are ignorant and mean about paying people to fix PCs. They think PCs are like fridges - buy use - end of story. They resent paying cash to keep the thing going. The same people pay 30-100 per hour to a garage to keep their cars going. People drop a PC with a problem in your lap and fter you have spent hours fixing it give you a £5 bottle of wine "for your trouble". Charge by the hour. Time what you do and be able to justify it. Tell the person your rates ar £15 per hour, £40 per hour or whatever. Ask them if they want to be phoned if the job starts getting expensive. Don't give your time, money and expertise away for for a few crumbs. Make sure the person knows your charging structure before you start work. They will probably go away and not come back - which is what you want really :) The key point is be be very certain in your mind what you want to sell an hour of your life, experience and skill for.
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Well said. My mum said she saw him today and I asked how much I was getting and the response was "well how much does he want for it?" I said £30 my mum said £40 for the same reason you mentioned Ie. doing it in my spare time etc. Soo it will be around that figure I guess.
 
Nice one Lee. £40 isn't ripping him off if he is prepared to pay for it.
It would still only equate to about £12-£15/hour anyways.
Good for you. :D
 
i would charge £20. quid for a OS, Driver, Apps install

if its for a friend then its free. as long as they don't keep asking to much :)
 
I agree with Skeeter in his post.... Its the thin end of the wedge.. You put the OS on for him and when ANYTHING goes wrong with the PC for the next 100 years he will be calling you...Unless of course you dont mind...:-)
Maybe he fancies you and not your mum ... only joking honest !!!! :-)
 
LeeTaylor17 said:
Well said. My mum said she saw him today and I asked how much I was getting and the response was "well how much does he want for it?" I said £30 my mum said £40 for the same reason you mentioned Ie. doing it in my spare time etc. Soo it will be around that figure I guess.
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That sounds fair.

Is he taking the computer round to your house or are you doing the work round his?
 
It varies. I'm running a computer suite now with server 2003 and 40 desktops and 100+ users. I get £20 an hour (only work two days a week for him) but when he does things like gives the idiots his admin logon and they royally **** up a comp or delete key files that kind of thing, I charge him £25 call out + £15 for each hour I'm there, which he thinks is more than reasonable. It really depends on how hard you think the work is and what you consider is a fair wage. In the case were people constantly **** stuff up, don't rip them off, but don't do it for charity either.

edit - Please fully-star out any swearing as per the rules. Thank you - Jedi
 
I've created intergrated install CD's, XP HE/Pro retail, XP HE/Pro OEM, etc, etc, all CD's have drivers for all major chipsets, sound cards, onboard audio, graphics, NIC's, etc, etc, i've also included any freeware thats worth having, all i need to do is connect a floppy drive, insert the apropiate OS CD and floppy disk containing the correct answer file (with the correct product code and usernames), connect the PC to a broadband modem using eithernet cable, then i go and whatch some TV, go have a bath or whatever, when i go back to the PC everything is done and dusted including activation, job done.

For this i charge £10, but with this method you don't realy have to do anything, the intergrated CD and answer file does all the work.
 
£30 - £40 otherwise why bother wasting your time for £10.

If I was you. Tell him £40.00, then explain roughly how long to install XP, Office and any other tweaks to OS and hardware you will be doing. Install additional programs as sugested to increase added value for your service. (av, firewall, spyware, registery tweaks, codecs, etc.. etc.. )

Setup partitions likes this

Windows XP - 10GB's
SWAP - 4GB's
DATA - Remaining space of hard disk.

Change Documents folder to be on Data partition. Get everything perfectly setup, swap residing on SWAP partition and not on XP partition. All drivers installed and everything working. Defrag har drive. Then create an image using "Norton Ghost" or "Drive Image".

Keep two copies of the image on DVD's. (30p each!!!). Tell him when it goes corrupt again you will refresh the operating system for £10 to £15. Will take you less than 10 minutes!! If drive defragged you can store image on SWAP partition as it'll only be about 1.3GB.

Get a few people like that and you can end up making £15 in less than 10 minutes. When they encounter problems or need a cleaned up OS. Only files to worry about will be on the desktop. Speed the first part up by creating your own XP Lite auto install CD's.

Hope that helps.
 
I normally get about £20 for an OS reinstall or cleanup which is about 1-2 hours work. I find that a lot of people are asking me if I can speed up their computers these days as it takes so long for them to boot. In about 99% of these cases they are running a machine that is about 3 years old and have Norton, Zone Alarm plus spyware apps running on startup which they think is protecting them when it is actually causing more problems. Windows firewall + NAT router is more than sufficient protection plus a free AV product.
 
semi-pro waster said:
I thought it was just installing software, what were you doing inside the computer? And nope, incompetence gets you no extra money. :p I always cut myself in computer cases for some reason, even rolled edges seem to make no difference. :o
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No output on screen, just reseated graphics card and worked. I dont know if that was a problem to begin with or what? Ahh well sorted, done, dusted thread over. :D
 
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