A guy I know wanted to hire me to sync up his pda phone to his computer (he was having issues not getting it to activesync with it.) so he hired me to fix that, although I have never done computer repair work (for money) before. He also asked me to fix his laptop which had been password protected by his daughter and she forgot the password. So, I was just wondering what people think is a fair price for computer repair (per hour.) I worked on the PDA for 3 hours and never got it to sync, but the computer I fixed (reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled windows after I got the key from Microsoft>)

I do this kind of thing occasionally, and I charge $35 an hour with a one hour minimum. I've been contemplating raiseing it to $40 an hour. No one has ever complained that I charge too much, so I assume I don't charge enough.

Matthew

I wouldn't take money. As soon as you do then you get called for free warranty repairs forever.

Man. I wanted to charge 50 for a recent consulting offer. The guy countered with 30. Guess I should have started lower.

I usually get somewhere ranging from a 6 pack to a carton. I don't ask for it though. Most people just offer if they're reasonable.

However I'm constantly fixing people's stuff.

Them: "Can you fix my clock radio"
Me: "No. Here's $20 buy another one"

Them: "Can you fix my $5000 RP TV"
Me: "Ummm... isn't it under warranty?"

When people ask me what I do, I need to think of something other than electrical engineer.

etc etc

If you where a "professional" at a consulting firm in a major city like San Francisco you'd charge anywhere from $80 to $150 an hour with (most likely) a 4 hour minimum. I've worked at the top end of that spectrum as well as fixing things for friends in exchange for a couple beers or dinner. I guess it depends on what your comfortable charging and your relationship with the person your helping. As an individual without much experience you should be able to collect half that with a good conscience and a happy client as long as you manage to fix or identify the problem and tell the person what the next step to get it fixed is.

-Mike

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I wouldn't take money. As soon as you do then you get called for free warranty repairs forever.

The truth is, there is no amount of money that makes this worthwhile. To make matters worse, people confuse their inability to use the computer with it needing "repair". This is a black hole. If you're going to do it, do it for free. Otherwise people feel entitled and are generally quite unreasonable about it.

FWIW,

Jim

I don't normally take any money. I usually do it for free but sometimes it'll be for lunch, dinner, beer or a favour to be used in the future. Sounds harsh but you should be careful about who you help out. Some people will blame you for anything that happens to the computer from the moment you touch it even if it isn't anything to do with you.

You could always ask them to buy you a T-shirt...

Man Paul... you beat me to it.

I own that shirt. I wear it often... it doesn't help. I was VERY serious when I wore it over to my dad's during the holidays, but that didn't stop him from asking me to move data from an old win98 Dell to a new XP Dell he'd bought my step-mother. Easy right? Of course not. 4 wasted mind numbing skull f'ing hours later it was done and I wasted the short time I had wanted to spend with pops doing frustrating computer horseshite. Sorry for the vent. =]

Yeah... get that shirt, and never work on friends computers.

I charge $65 an hour no matter who they are, unless, of course, it's family. Firm. It seems to cut down on the people asking for free help. I have 5 clients that use me for all their computer work. One is a local judge, the rest are small businesses. The trick is, If it takes me longer than I feel it should have, I charge them what I feel it should have taken me. I also knock my price down to $50 (without them knowing) if they're repeat business. Seems to work out. They hate calling me unless they really need me.

This has just sorted out my personal conundrum with this issue perfectly. Thanks, I owe you a beer. Now I have to learn how to be brutal...

Personally, I'm a big fan of barter. My allergist (then 60+ years old) got her first ever computer, a Mac iBook. I helped her set it up and answered questions as she was learning how to work the thing. She gave me huge piles of free samples that saved me a ton of money on prescription drugs.

I used to charge $45 and hour then I raised my rates to $75 and hour. I now charge $125 an hour. I had to start charging more because I have less time to do the work outside of the office.

After college and before I got my job, I supported myself on freelance computer repair. I generally didn't do work for friends and family, but mostly for people in my neighborhood. That was a pretty good balance of convenience and emotional distance. I didn't know most of these people.

Plus, the work was easier. 95% of the many jobs I had consisted entirely of removing spyware and viruses. This meant spending many hours watching Ad-Aware and AVG do their thing, with little interaction from me. When I started I wasn't very confident, so I charged something like $10 or $15 an hour. By the time I'd finished I was charging $45. People around here still paid that.

My tactic was to quote higher numbers to people I didn't want to do work for. There's one family that really gets on my nerves for too many reasons to list here. I quote them $85 an hour

Heh, I do the same thing.. . If it's a pain, or beneath me, I say, "I'm expensive, for that kind of issue you may want to call (other tech in the office), he's much cheaper. I occasionally have to do it anyway, depending on what the issue is, though. He can only handle certain types of issues.

I once (now about 5 years ago) sold a pc to a coworker of mine. I didn't even make any money out of it because I did it as a favour. I wish I had. Little did I know that she was the mother of all misers. Up to this date, she's still constantly pestering me with this and thats. I try to postpone going to her house to fix it, sometimes for months, but she's very persistent.
She never pays anything, and my incentive to do her favours is weary very VERY thin!

Now I wouldn't even sell her a PC anymore, not even with a $1000 profit margin! If she ever contacts me because she wants a new pc (which I expect any day now, since her pc is now more than 5 years old), I'll point her towards the Dell site for sure.

Despite all this talk to the contrary, I ended up spending this whole afternoon fixing an English professor's home machine. The configuration was a mess. Somebody had, at one distant point in the past, configured her home DSL with an Apple AirPort Express, including serving her HP all-in-one fax/print/scan gateway via the AirPort. Then, at some other point, things went wrong. A succession of people tried to fix things, including SBC/Yahoo DSL's tech support people. By the time I got to it, the configuration was a shambles. SBC's tech support, in particular, had directed her to rip out the AirPort and had her connected directly to the DSL modem and running some awful SBC/Yahoo PPPoE "dialup" software. Uggh.

I stripped out all of that old junk, as well as Comet Cursor and Starwave. How did those get on there? Zap!

Anyway, the "AirPort Setup Assistant" that was already on her machine wasn't working properly. Thankfully, a neighbor was participating in the Linksys Public Wireless Network, so I was able to download the latest from Apple and reconfigure the AirPort from scratch. Now, that part at least is working as it was intended to work.

The printer is another matter. I've fought with these all-in-one gizmos before, and it's never pretty. I figured Apple's Bonjour might be the easiest way to go, since it certainly should have been able to find the printer hanging off the AirPort. Turns out, the user account I'm using doesn't have sufficient privileges to install a printer! Aarrrgggh. (Or, that's what happened when I tried to point the printer wizard at the specific drivers for the printer.) I decided to back off the AirPort, for the printer, and connect it directly to the computer. This worked exactly how it was supposed to work.

Fine, back to Bonjour and the network printer. Of course, of the zillions of OfficeJet products that appear in the printer selection wizard, none of them are the printer I just installed. I have some reason to suspect that the printer is a DeskJet 9xx, so I figured why not try those? I went for the DeskJet 920c. Sure 'nuff, printing seems to work! So far as I can tell, she doesn't care about the "multifunction" bits, so I think I'll call it done for a day.

How on earth are non-technical people supposed to be able to make this sort of thing "just work"? Even if you go with an all-Apple solution, does this stuff get any easier? Wow. I'm just trying to make sure I leave enough notes, all in one place, that whoever comes after me doesn't feel the need to rip everything out and start all over again.

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I'm just trying to make sure I leave enough notes, all in one place, that whoever comes after me doesn't feel the need to rip everything out and start all over again.

Nice idea. Unfortnately, I believe this is done because the person working on the machine has a very limited understanding of what they're doing. Because they don't know how the stuff actually works, they try to reach a configuration that has worked for them in the past. This is obviously what happened with the Yahoo phone support -- um -- yahoos. So, you set it up in a way you judge to be optimal because you understand how it all actually works. The problem is that your successor probably doesn't and won't be able to recreate your thought process, or even understand it if you write it down.

Add to all of this the fact that as soon as something "doesn't work", the user will start trying a bunch of random stuff and will change the configuration and not be able to get it back. Of course, this will all be your fault for some reason.

Sorry it went so badly.

What I want to know is what is the best way to refuse to help someone with their computer? This is especially tough when the requester is a friend or relative since they *know* that you are able to help them. Its a problem: I *can* help them, but I don't want to. Is there any polite way to extract one's self from this situation?

Jim

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What I want to know is what is the best way to refuse to help someone with their computer? This is especially tough when the requester is a friend or relative since they *know* that you are able to help them. Its a problem: I *can* help them, but I don't want to. Is there any polite way to extract one's self from this situation?

I usually help people but refuse money then when they have problems in the future I can tell them to pay someone that knows what they are doing to fix it.

I suppose you could just do a really terrible job of "fixing" it and maybe word will get around not to ask you because you suck.

Or maybe curse loudly in front of their children. Or something else obnoxious.

Quote:
What I want to know is what is the best way to refuse to help someone with their computer? This is especially tough when the requester is a friend or relative since they *know* that you are able to help them. Its a problem: I *can* help them, but I don't want to. Is there any polite way to extract one's self from this situation?

Move 1500 miles and two time zones away. It's a little impractical, but very effective.

I had to telephone troubleshoot a new monitor with the wife of the big boss one day from California (she was in NH). I don't know how, but she'd set the screen resolution way too low and some of the dialog boxes were off the screen (you know the ones where you hit OK at the bottom of the box). It took me a frigging _hour_ to realize that she had to set the MONITOR's vertical alignment up via the hardware buttons of the front of the monitor.

Gah. I guess that was covered by my salary, but I wouldn't do that kind of work for anything less (family excepted).

People wonder why phone tech support is very often poor? I don't! It's almost an impossible task.

-Zeke

While we're sharing stories, I've got a fun one:

I was helping build a new machine for this annoying family from my church. They're just from a different viewpoint than I am, but I will say that they're not the nicest ultra-conservatives that I've met. Not to mention their views of religion are off-putting to me (I'd probably call the father xenophobic - long story).

Anyway, I was backing up the hard drive of their old computer which had been hosed by a virus or something, and I'm keeping an eye on it. This was a family computer, so the parents and two sons also used it. The two largest folders on the computer belonged to the father and older son. When the older son's folder goes by, I start seeing an extraordinarily large amount of what you'd expect to find on an 18 year old boy's computer. I just find it funny because the computer had been sitting in what I would have thought was a pretty high traffic area in their house

Of course, when the new computer arrived, it was time to move the old files back. Most of the family was in the room, and I was asking each of them which items they wanted to keep. I get to the older son and before I can open his folder he quickly says "I don't need anything. You can delete it all."

Aaah yes. Good ol' porn.

"The Internet is for Porn!" - Song from the musical 'Avenue Q'.

Your story reminds me of the old Harvard Divinity School Dean story. Aaah, the classics!

-Zeke