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So like many Americans my age, I could use some extra cash. After a summer unsuccessfully finding a new job and the possibility of getting laid off at the school I work at I came up with the idea of possibly becoming a in home PC Repair Guy. Not working for a company, just going out and doing it myself. I use to work at a Geek Squad so I know how to do it, but I don't have any kind of certifications other than my Computer Forensics minor from college. (Half of that is copyright law) Does anyone here do the same thing and can you give me some tips or stuff I should know about getting started? BigRed0427 fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 17:40
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Dealing with end customers is terrible. Everything needs to be free (won't spend any money on software or hardware) and it pays like poo poo since you are competing with 15 year olds who do this for pocket money. I would try to do general IT stuff for small businesses instead. Though they are more stingy than large corporations they do understand the concept of investing in things and you can build a actual relationship with them and get return business. Just how many times is grandma going to pay to reinstall windows before she says gently caress it and gets an iPad? This was a terrible business with bad customers and margins 10 years ago, can't imagine how bad it is now. In terms of knowledge: Unattended windows reinstall with some automated installations of most commonly used programs is probably the most cost effective solution and no end user knows what all those certifications mean anyway.
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Aug 18, 2014 18:45
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BigRed0427 posted:So like many Americans my age, I could use some extra cash. After a summer unsuccessfully finding a new job and the possibility of getting laid off at the school I work at I came up with the idea of possibly becoming a in home PC Repair Guy. Not working for a company, just going out and doing it myself. I use to work at a Geek Squad so I know how to do it, but I don't have any kind of certifications other than my Computer Forensics minor from college. (Half of that is copyright law) Bring a tablet/phone with you to everything, because you will want something to do for the hours of mindless tedium. 99% of what you will be doing is sitting there waiting for a million and six toolbars to uninstall. I do a bit of it on the side for extra cash, mostly advertising through word of mouth. I charge by the hour for this reason. I have spent 6 hours just uninstalling. and uninstalling. and uninstalling. And at $25/hr I'm a whole lot cheaper than geeksquad, etc. No one is going to care about certs, they care about how much it's going to cost them. Depending on how much of an rear end in a top hat they're being, I will tack on additional fees and let them know what I'm doing as I do it, but it'll be stuff like "I notice you have no antivirus installed on here. You need to buy one. It'll be an additional $30 for the best one out there." while I install Avast. It really can be a good gig if you're A) willing to be a bit immoral and charge as though they need to purchase software while using open-source solutions. and B) Have a high tolerance for idiotic assholes. Because people will be assholes to you. They will treat you like poo poo, act as though everything is your fault, attempt to blame you when 3 hours after you leave they can't find their Banzai Buddy anymore, and you've managed to "break their facebook" because now they can actually see their newsfeed beyond the 3/4 of a screen of toolbars. Although to get around the "refuses to spend money" thing I usually bring a knoppix live-cd with me, because it goes a whole lot quicker to uninstall a ton of crapware in linux than waiting for windows uninstaller. I tell any client that's being stingy that it is entirely possible to have nothing but free software for everything. However ease-of-use is generally inverse to price, and I show them everything I'm doing in linux and point out that it's a free alternative to windows, and I'm more than happy to teach them at the same $25/hr rate. I've had two people actually spend a weekend learning the basics of ubuntu and libreoffice etc because they figure $250 upfront was worth it to save in the long term, but 90% of people get scared off and go "Yeah, i'd rather spend the money" Just take comfort in knowing that even if you're shady as hell, you're still being less shady than 80% of other in-home IT guys. \/\/ Most of the time, these guys have old as poo poo computers that are still running XP and they don't have the recovery discs or serial #'s anymore. Or if they do, it winds up taking just as long to format/reinstall XP and go through the billion or so essential updates, reimport all their photos/music/etc as it does to go through and uninstall all the crap they've installed. If they don't have a lot of personal data on the computer or if it is already all nicely backed up and they do have recovery disks or the OS install disk/serial handy, I will format/reinstall if it will be quicker. But really most of the people I do work for care most about keeping all their pictures/music/porn and just backing all that up to start over from scratch can take 2-3 hours on its own, especially with people who save poo poo willy-nilly all over the harddrive. And these are people where if you happen to accidentally delete that picture they took of their thumb on vacation 15 years ago that they haven't looked at since they bought the computer and first connected their camera, they will refuse to pay for any of the work you've done. Just easier/less hassle to go through and uninstall all the crap piecemeal. Dr Jankenstein fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 19:27
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AA is for Quitters posted:99% of what you will be doing is sitting there waiting for a million and six toolbars to uninstall. I do a bit of it on the side for extra cash, mostly advertising through word of mouth. I charge by the hour for this reason. I have spent 6 hours just uninstalling. and uninstalling. and uninstalling. And at $25/hr I'm a whole lot cheaper than geeksquad, etc. I've always wanted to ask, is there are a reason other than "i get to bill a additional 4 hours" you don't just do a flatten and reinstall?
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Aug 18, 2014 19:45
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It's about opportunity cost. People want their poo poo saved. Pictures, porn, outlook bullshit, whatever. They want a version of office that hasn't been supported in 20 years, and they want their contacts lists just the way they were. Some of this is copy pastable or scriptable, but some of it isn't. This goes beyond home PC repair, to pretty much any tech job, that one of the skills of the trade is the experience to be able to correctly judge when something like a flatten reinstall is going to be more of a pain in the rear end than just selectively fixing whatever problems make you want to resort to that in the first place.
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Aug 18, 2014 20:17
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I'm going to guess running a business based around making people think they are buying free software is a good path to getting sued by somebody. Probably oughta be careful with that. Everything else you said is dead-on though. It would really take a lot of money for me to work on random people's home computers again. It's always fun to get a call from someone who hired you to remove a virus and then 3 years later their hard drive crashes and they are blaming you because you were the last one to "touch it" or whatever.
beejay fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 20:17
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I refuse to do work for anyone I don't know specifically for those people that say "you broke google" or "this old software that is rated for windows 95 used to work, now it doesn't" (No, it didn't. It never did). One piece of advice I can give if you decide to blow away the PC, is be paranoid. Anytime a friend asks me to reinstall Windows I use imagex to make a copy of the drive. It's free through Windows AIK, and pretty simple once you get the hang of it. You can mount it and recover almost ANY file that was on the PC before (ok, so it skips some system files). You can compress it too. At worst case if something goes bad or if customer bitches, you can restore the computer right back to its original state and walk away. I also offer to keep a backup on my PC for as long as they are willing to pay me (monthly) to keep it, or I offer to burn it to CD/Flash drive for them (Good luck on figuring out how to use it when you had 90 toolbars installed.
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Aug 19, 2014 03:17
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beejay posted:I'm going to guess running a business based around making people think they are buying free software is a good path to getting sued by somebody. Probably oughta be careful with that. Everything else you said is dead-on though. It would really take a lot of money for me to work on random people's home computers again. It's always fun to get a call from someone who hired you to remove a virus and then 3 years later their hard drive crashes and they are blaming you because you were the last one to "touch it" or whatever. This is why you only charge the assholes who obviously have no clue. It's also where you get really good at invoicing. It's always a charge for "antivirus install+configuration" never the software charge. I really try to avoid the rear end in a top hat charges too, but when I have someone being a dick to me because yes, i dumped the entire contents of the desktop into a folder so I could see the loving system icons then yeah, I'm going to start charging for everything. And yeah, not wanting to image an entire drive is most of the reason i don't flatten drives. I did it once, luckily for a family member and not a customer, and despite plenty of warning that if I did this then all the problems will be fixed, but he will lose anything I didn't back up, what did he want me to save? And then he got pissed because he had to go through and reinstall all his games and he couldn't figure that out on his own and all the lovely flash games he played were the source of 80% of the toolbars to start with...just easier to remove everything that needs removed bit by bit. Now I wouldn't do it unless it is someone that has carbonite or something to backup everything, and doesn't have much on their in the first place. Most of those people, however, either are smart enough to not install every popup that comes up, or smart enough to figure out how to remove them themselves. If I could just do home networking, I'd love in home work a whole lot more. Setting up wifi+chromecast+the rest of your AV system just cause I'm there is so much more fun than uninstalling all your bullshit, but all the money is in uninstalling poo poo.
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Aug 19, 2014 13:38
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Don't do it. The people who call you will be the kind of people who buy computers from supermarkets. Their piece of poo poo Pentium 4 Celeron with 256MB will take 15 minutes to boot, followed by 10 minutes of random pop-ups from all the viruses they have. They won't have installed any updates for eight years because their idiot son disabled Windows Update. They will have six AV programs installed, none of which is working correctly, and none of which will have been updated for years. They will have icons covering the desktop - half of them super important poo poo that they have not looked at for five years, but which they will raise hell about if you delete (and by "delete" I mean "move one place away from where they're used to seeing it"). They will have no backups, and no recovery disks. They will complain about the price no matter how low because "my grandson could have done that!". Then when you have finished the first thing they will do is reinstall the virus-riddled coupon toolbar that caused all the problems to begin with.
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Aug 19, 2014 18:38
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I would like to thank this thread for reaffirming my decision to move out of IT and into sales. gently caress that poo poo. Edit: For a summer, I had a position with a temp IT agency that would send me to small businesses to fix trivial poo poo. It was pretty fun, and $18/hr 4 hour minimum was nice for a college kid. If you're at all competent, people will start asking for you (Most of the "techs" were idiots - one girl couldn't figure out how to install a docking station for a laptop. Oh, and she tightened down a VGA cable that was installed incorrectly with a loving screwdriver, stripping out the threads in the soft plastic). KillHour fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 04:24
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Don't forget the two worst parts aside from rear end in a top hat customers: 1) You'll be entering peoples homes, and working in their most sacred (for men mostly) space, the computer room. Be prepared to find illegal, horrible, or just plain disgusting stuff on their computer. Had to call the cops at least once for stuff I found on a hard drive. 2) Smokers, I'm a smoker myself... but if you ever need to physically work on a computer that a heavy smoker used let me warn you now. The usual accumulation of dust in the fan screens will be a brown color, as will the white case (or if it's the old beige case, an even deeper almost black-brown), let's not forget the smell! Reminded me of that whiff you get when a homeless guy walks past, who you saw 5 minutes earlier smoking the butts he fished out of the garbage can
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Sep 4, 2014 11:01
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AA is for Quitters posted:They will treat you like poo poo, act as though everything is your fault, attempt to blame you when 3 hours after you leave they can't find their Banzai Buddy anymore, and you've managed to "break their facebook" because now they can actually see their newsfeed beyond the 3/4 of a screen of toolbars. poo poo, this can't be stressed enough. I was one of the underpaid young men working a small repair outfit once upon a time and people would blame you for every loving thing. You'll grow to despise every last human being a little more every time you hear, "How come my computer has a virus AGAIN? You JUST cleaned it [days to months ago]" or really anything suggesting you're to blame for their own ignorance or misuse. Also their computers get goddamn disgusting. I turned away people regularly for bringing in computers with roaches nesting in their power supplies (this is such a disgusting smell) and I've blown out cases with super thick carpets of dust inside and I've serviced laptops with so much bullshit spilled in the keyboards that the keys were sticky and the laptop itself stank. One of my colleagues checked in a computer that was only roach-free because the spider infestation ate big. For real though, the worst part of it all is the ignorance. Thank god I got out of it before I finally snapped and murdered someone for referring to a desktop PC a modem for the umpteenth time. I was fantastic at what I did and if it weren't for the awful customers and poo poo pay I would've happily kept at break-fix work for a long time. One exception, if you can swing it, is if you can get a gig as a swing shift break-fix tech for a large business. The hours are long and weird, but there's always a chance it'd pay better than your main gig and you'd never have to deal with the end user.
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Sep 5, 2014 02:37
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