Suggestions for a PC Home Tech Support Business? 165
RPGonAS400 asks: "I want to start my own small business in the evening and on weekends (after my day job) going into peoples homes for PC tech support. There has to be a need for this — I help enough friends out with their PC problems. I live in an area that has roughly 50,000+ people within 15 minutes of my home. The best business oriented tech support in our area charges $95/hour for hardware repair and $135/hour for software support. Options for home based PCs are quite limited here. Geek Squad (yuk!) charges outrageous prices. I am not sure what I will charge but I plan on having a minimum charge and then only charge for actual work done. If I have to learn how to fix something I either won't take the job or else not charge for my learning time. I am looking for suggestions for lots of things. Namely, rates, liability, insurance, equipment needed, waiver forms, tax issues, incorporation, local paper advertising, web site, etc. As you probably guessed, I have always been an employee and this is my first venture into small business. Thanks."
Essential (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What to do about OS re-installs? (Score:3, Funny)
"I need to reinstall Windows"
"will I get all my stuff back?"
"have you got the original disks?"
"what disks?"
I saw machines that were so old that drivers and the like were no longer available - no use reinstalling if you can't get the hardware going.
I would never use my own disks for an installation, if they didn't have disks, and the machine could stand a later version, and the customer had disks for their software, then I would buy a copy for them and install it.
Now, I'm sure some one out there is thinking that it would be a good chance to spread the Linux message and replace windows with Linux - Don't. I know of someone who nearly ended up in court being sued because he provided linux when the customer was expecting windows.
Chris