Doesnt often happen here, but someone wants me to look at their home network as theyve cocked it up a bit. He has offered to pay. It doesnt sound like an enourmously long job but I want to be paid appropriatly for my time
He reckoned he would pay PC World '50 or 60 quid to sort it' - is that realistic for those places? Whats a sensible per hour rate to charge him?
I usually leave it up to their discretion if I think they're going to be fair, but a good rate is £20 the first hour and £10 after that. It's cheap, yes, but they have a good value impression then.
Fair enough
Well if hes willing to give me that 50/60 quid Id be more than happy with that, as long as im not there too long
I normally charge £30 for internet stuff.
Just beware of old / slow home computers. Can make your planned 30 min job turn into hours
Originally Posted by sidewinder
£20 then £10 there after. is it wireless?
£20/£10 rule works well for me here too but most people who need help live closer to school than me so it's on my way home anyway... Bend the rules a bit if I'm cleaning up spyware etc and just spend 3 hours sat on my ar$e waiting for adaware scans to finish, or preferably take the machine away to leave it running in my own time.
Bit of both, god knows what he's done but I think hes getting confused with his router and how to connect things to it, he seems to have thought you have to run the windows networking wizard to get the internet on other machines
Hopefully will just be a quick job of setting everything up as it should be
The discretion route works most times but I did a job for a TA recently that involved sorting out a botched wire job. It involved a couple of visits to a remote country house which probably cost me at least a fiver in petrol - she gave me a tin of biscuits!
were they unleaded biscuits?The discretion route works most times but I did a job for a TA recently that involved sorting out a botched wire job. It involved a couple of visits to a remote country house which probably cost me at least a fiver in petrol - she gave me a tin of biscuits
The price you quote partly depends on how much you want to do the ongoing work - you could ask for £50 and get an hour or two of work, or ask less than that and be more likely to get some repeat business and maybe stuff from other colleagues. Of course, if they are willing to pay £50-60, I don't see much point in asking for any less :-)
Actually, if the "skilled" people at PC World are worth £50, you're surely worth at least £80...
You will of course be telling the tax man about this work, won't you......
Like Sysman I'm wary of these things now, my last job was a crippled Athlon 1500 with 256meg ram that was running slow..... It was riddled with spyware and crap and the person had 56k internet.
About £20 is probally the minimum to make it worth your while but never much over unless you need parts, I never like to charge alot, you get more business that way.
pice of cake thenwors comes to worst just reset to factory default if he's been bashing around in the router settings
Is it just me that feels guilty taking money for this off of freinds, family and collegues?
I also don't like doing it, whenever I visit home my dad gets me to look at either his pc, or my aunties. Now he's a BT Engineer, should I get him to look at mine and my neighbours phone lines whenever he visits me.
familly no. but friends and other folk yes
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