Charging to format question...


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There is someone that wants me to add a 2nd hard drive to their computer, format their computer, reinstall windows and all their programs... I don't know how much to charge this person...

what do you think? Whats a good price?

thanks

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That depends on how much software they want you to install and how much of their old data they want kept. Try finding out what a computer shop would charge for such a service and then go from there.

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Best thing to do is to look around and see what other people charge.

Then either charge the same, or charge a little (and I mean a LITTLE less) and hope that by word of mouth they recommend you to others.

Something along the lines of what you want to do could cost around the ?100 mark at PC World in the UK!

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? 50 / $75 max.

I wouldn't consider anymore, beacuse i reckon that that'd take you about 2 hrs (with installation and copying etc), and very little effort indeed ?25/ $ 37 per hour is not bad, by anyone's standards. Have a good book to read whilst installing! thats my advice.

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i charge $40 an hour, for whatever that's worth :)

You must get the client whipsering down your ear 'HURRY UP!' while you are trying to work ;)

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I hate people who don't think your time is precious, just because it isn't to them.

For example, people who ask you to check code for them online, then continue asking questions all night about it.

I also hate checking code that iosn't indented properly. I know people that have the poorest indentation methods ever. (i.e. they make use of comments to tell the person reading the code which section each bit of code is in, when identation should do this naturally)

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You might want to check that all the hardware is being correctly detected in device manager before you start in case you have any problems after re-installing. Also I'd use the new HD as the main drive and keep the old drive as it is until you're sure it is all working and it makes it easy to copy stuff over.

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unless you know the person quite well .. always assume that there are EXISTING problems with the hardware before you ever start a job !!!

restart the cpu a few times, check device manager for hiccups, etc etc. in my opinion this self assurance check will save you lots of headaches in the long run. you would be amazed at how many peeps will say, " well it worked fine before you started messing with it!! " LOL

and i would probably do the hard drive job for about 20 bucks, and let the rest of the job (software installation) be flexible .. considering how much of it they want u to do.

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I hate charging people though so I usually end up doing it for nothing. :(

Yeah i hate taking money from people - you feel so low - espically when its something easy and simple like a format and install :/

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man i do these jobs like 7 times a day and they're all free, i've never charged someone a cent i better start doing so, lol but i swear at a store i saw it it's like "Opening up the case and inspecting to find the error - $50" WTF lol and thats just finding the error, so if they cant find it they still charge it lol

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$40-$50 flat fee for hardware/reinstall jobs. I hate charging people though so I usually end up doing it for nothing. :(

See, we're the same for that. I just hate charging people for that, specially when it's obvious that the person is poor. I normally charge also 40$ CAN for every format/HW job, and if I only go do a small job (troubleshooting), I don't charge more than 10-15$...

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hehe.. try circuit city.. i was shopping for a new HDTV dlp recently and noticed the repair / tech area. it had a sign that said 65 bux just to drop the darn cpu off.. anything beyond inspection started additional charges.

and just think if peeps would just read the NeoWin forums they could learn enuf to do it themselves. pathetic. :p

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