If this is something you will only be doing in the evenings, you could find yourself facing some customers who are upset that things are taking so long. The same people who thought they would be able to strike it rich by following some emailed link and got Cryptolocker are also the ones who do not understand what realistic repair times are. Residential customers tend to be an impatient lot (not to say business customers are not). I'd charge at LEAST $50/hour for home users, and if you are supporting businesses double or more than that (if you are good what you do -) ) Can make some good side cash.Īgain - DON'T UNDERSELL YOURSELF. It's crazy how a few clients can ramp into 10, 20, 50+ clients. I also would backup (image level with Macrium Reflect) all laptops / computers I worked on to a few TB locally and cloud offsite cloud replication so when they have issues down the line I would be able to pull some data for them. If you get more serious, get a domain and setup Google Apps for yourself for $5 - $10 / month or whatever they charge these days. Email all of your clients with XP end of life or whatever else - can very quickly ramp up work. I also recomend creating an internal WIKI for yourself with client name/contact info, and DOCUMENT all of their hardware / serial numbers / product keys etc etc etc. I would usually promise a 7 day turn around so I could do it on MY time. I can't tell you how many times I would just get handed a laptop of a friend of a friend and then bugged for "when is it ready and fixed". Make SURE to have some clear expectations on returning. Otherwise just take HDD out, scan externally, put back in, run through some maintenance, setup Ninite or other update tools. I would do AV/Repairs for $100 flat rate, unless I encountered something "critical". You will turn to drink.ĭon't undercharge. It will not be the customers you wanted to see. You will see some ancient machines which will suck your time and, if you're really unlucky, your very living soul. You will get a lot of 'call backs' as people expect you to just quickly fix this little thing that's changed, and they won't pay you because it's your fault it's not exactly how it used to be. You will spend a lot of time as a trainer rather than a tech. Don't expect to earn a decent hourly rate. If you're doing it for experience and a little bit of spending money, that's fine. Things which are unimportant to us (like the exact layout of the icons on their desktops) are level-1 critical, can't-look-at-pictures-of-my-grandson-because-the-big-E-has-moved type problems. You cannot simply image the desktop, have them log in, and have everything automagically configured for them like you can in a decent sized business. Resetting Windows isn’t the long and arduous process it once was.out of the comfort of my own home and schedule Then follow the installer’s instructions. If you have an Intel processor, turn on your Mac and continue to hold Cmd+R to launch the Utilities program ( more here). For the few new models with silicon, turn on your device and continue to hold the power button until the startup options window appears. On Windows, you can head to Update & Security from Settings, then choose Recovery, and select Get started under Reset this PC ( more here), whereas on macOS your process will vary depending on whether your computer uses Apple silicon or an Intel processor. What makes this worth trying is that Microsoft and Apple have made reinstalling their operating systems so straightforward. You’ll want to make sure that you have all your data backed up before starting the reinstallation process. It wipes out troublesome programs, erases many viruses and types of malware, resets your internet connection settings and generally gives you a blank slate. Reinstalling Windows or macOS and starting from scratch is a more extreme version of the “cut down on the bloat” solution we mentioned above.
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