1

Hello, I’ve been contacted to do some repairs on 6 HP laptops. I’ve never charged for fixes, just normally fixing family/friends tech. I’m looking to make some money on the side now (I work at a school district and have many connections now). Anyways, I’m unsure of what to charge this person that contacted me to fix some laptops- here are the details:

  1. Format Hard Drive,
  2. Instal Win 8,
  3. Microsoft Office Package,
  4. AVG Virus Software (Free Lifetime Updates)
  5. Adobe Acrobat,
  6. Diagnostics of the entire system after to check hard drive, cdrom,
    floppy, etc
    Any and all suggestions/responses are welcome! Thank you in advance.
6 Spice ups
2

I would phone your local big box store see how much they charge for that and charge less then that. Is one option.

Are they bring the items to you or you going there?

2 Spice ups
3

You are not going to strip them down to clear out the fans and filters and reapply thermal compound. If I were you I would also check the CPU temperature to make sure all is well in addition to the listed jobs. The actual time to do that task is about an hour of time with each laptop allowing going back and forth between them and doing 6 of them should be about 6 hours worth of labour. I don’t know where you live but I suggest you charge about 6 times the typical hourly rate for your area plus the cost of any licences you have to buy, You want more work and do not want to over charge on this one to encourage more work. You could get an idea of typical charges by phoning some PC outfits saying what you want and asking for a rough estimate and that will give you a feel for the going rate. If they object to the charge you could offer to install Libre Office for free.

4

Is this a real person or a Craigslist ad? A buddy of mine was going to do something similar last year and it was one of those scams where they send you a check for more than the task and tell you to subtract your fee and send the overage back to them. By the time your bank finds out it is a bad check you have sent your money to them. It sounded fishy so a little Google research and I told him to drop it.

Hopefully this is from someone you have actually met but I thought I would throw this out just in case.

4 Spice ups
5

Hey thanks for the heads up. I actually posted on Craigslist about a month ago offering services in my area and this person just replied last night. They did mention sending a check and something about subtracting the difference. I thought it seemed a little fishy as well. Good thing I posted here and thanks for the reply!

1 Spice up
6

Good job this was spotted. Doing jobs such as these you have to be very careful. I guess you have to have terms and conditions such as if they want to pay by check in advance then any return of balance has to wait until the check is cleared and at the next month end. As an alternative you want cash at collection or delivery of goods.

1 Spice up
7

In addition to it likely being a scam, you should put #6 first. In fact, “Replace hard drive with SSD drive” would be right after checking the rest of the laptop. I never reinstall an OS on a current drive in laptops unless it’s already a new-ish, quality brand, SSD drive. The difference going from the typical laptop 5,400 RPM drive to an SSD is mind-boggling.

Gregg

8

Glad to be of service!