For those that provide home/small business IT repairs etc
 

Hi all,

After having gone through 4 or 5 hairbrained schemes, ive come to the conlcusion that I should stick to what im good at (allegedly IT.... J/K)

So I'm thinking about starting up doing IT repairs in the home/small businesses after hours. Im not looking to get rich or anything, just paying my monthly optimax bill would be good.

I've scowered the local paper and there are only 2 companies currently that do this, neither of whom have the qualifications/logos if u get my drift.

Basically im just looking at the "usual" type of services such as hardware/software break fix repair and broadband wireless and installation/config etc.

So any of you that do it, do you have any general advice, especially regards payment rates etc ? I know some have given me valuable info in the past, just looking to for any more that people are willing to share.

Cheers

Stu

You need to be cheap, and the best hit of all is to target local school pupils! If you offer the schools concerned a small fee the will gladly hand out your flyer at the end of the day to the students. I mean, apart from illiterate adults, who are the main culprits of pc failure? Exactly. Put your advert in the hands of the parents are you are made :D Keep it cheap.. I mean really cheap.... get a fan-base going and then increase your rates. From word of mouth they will not be able to say no :D

Remember to repeat the following to the customer at every new job you start:

Have you got a full working current backup.

lol the backup thing. I know *all* about that one !!!

Soulgirl - dang good idea the parent thing :)

Once you have touched the PC for the first time expect to get a phone call blaming you every time something else goes wrong, even if it is completely unrelated.

Trouble with PC's is people can't understand that a problem with the network settings is not going to be affected by installing Office (for example). As far as they are concerned it was working before you touched it and hence it's your fault.

Considering the rubbish hardware and state most people's PC's are in I personally wouldn't touch this with a bargepole.

I won't even touch friends PC's anymore as it causes far too much hassle.

Joeydeacon has a valid point.

When i started thinking about this due to helping so many people out you start to see that most peoples machines are so far behind they arent worth fixing. They still run windows 98 with no firewall, antivirus etc.

They run soo slow they take hours to fix and then you have to reccomend upgrading to XP to stop them getting hijacks, viruses etc the moment you walk out the door.

If you still want to do it make sure you have some kind of contract where by if you fix there machine and the next day they go and get there browser hijacked again they have to pay again, cos they will say you never fixed it properly

Stuey.. let us know how you get on :)

What the latter two posts fail to understand is that no matter what goes wrong with the pc's after your visit, you still get paid to sort them out again.

Of course, you would have lain clues before you left after the first visit.. such as, well, it is running perfectly now, is clean and stable. What ever happens from here on in is down to you and anyone else that touches the pc and enters the world wide web... it's a fascinating but dangerous place to be :D

I'd disagree and go with JoeyDeacon... most home user numpties assume all problems are related and you should therefore fix the next problem for free (IME).

Agree too - noobie pc users are a nightmare. Expect installations to never go smoothly. The amount of times I have heard - yeah it will only take 30mins but ends up taking 6hrs :D :D So charge by the hour.

If your going to do it then I recommend a wipe and rebuild OS policy instead of going down the repair/troubleshoot OS route.

I do a few home Pc's every now and again but they are only brought to me through word of mouth. I am very clear that I will initially take a view of what's wrong with the unit f.o.c and then advise them what I have found and what it will cost to put right.

As previously stated I reiterate the fact that they must have a current backup of all their data before I start work or if the system has crashed badly I do not promise to be able to retrieve any data and they must accept this before I start.

Invariably the unit is always re-formatted and reloaded so I know that it is 100% good as fault finding a dodgy system (mostly 98) takes more time with no guaranteed results and an unhappy user at the end. Plus hard disks that only have 10-50mb free space suddenly have gb to play with once all the proper software has been loaded.

Normal problems are the result of viruses and because the user hasn't got a clue about firewalls, antivirus, opening spam/dodgy emails, wildly clicking on pop-up web browser boxes etc etc etc.

After the system is restored to working order I try and educate the user about the importance of security updates, not opening funny emails, controlling/supervising the children when they surf the internet, updating their antivirus (obviously now purchased or free version installed if really strapped for cash).

I normally find out what PC World (as they seem to be an obvious choice) would charge for doing the job and then undercut that.

Henry

That is actually a fair point, I would say go for it, you've nothing to loose, adverts in small shops windows, supermarket boards not such a bad place to start either.

But you wanna be careful, I remember my old man was asked to sign a weaver when he took his laptop to a shop to get some extra ram. I get similar thing ending up helping my mates out mending their machines, but they've often got real wrecks, but if they wanna pay for you - why not. Most of the time it is just windows needs a nice new install, defrag etc and it's right as rain! Failing that a good smack on the side :D Have a wee search on the web, see if you can find some small retailers that offer similar services and see what their policy is, and COPY! ;)