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I'm trying to figure out what a reasonable rate to charge for general tech work in a rural area is. People out here don't have a lot of money, though they don't have much bad computer trouble either. It's mostly fried motherboards or modems from electrical storms, and home networking, and virus removal, though I am doing some web design as well. Basically I'm looking for ideas of what to charge for the following, since there are a lot of local computer illiterates interested in such services:

Virus removal
hardware work
network installation or troubleshooting
website work

Any ideas would be appreciated. This is in Grayson County, which is in North Texas, if anyone knows the area.

upon purchasing a lot of 10 Thinkpad 600/600E chassis on ebay as a gamble on upgrading my wife's laptop beyond its Thinkpad 600/300mhz status (plus its bad motherboard), I discovered on its delivery that the person who posted the auction had much understated the specs of the chassis in question. Not a single Thinkpad 600, all were 600E. Not a single processor below 300 mhz (two 300mhz), and many of them worked fine.

Interesting part hasn't come yet. The processor list, all MMC-2 interface:

2 300mhz Mobile Pentium II
4 366mhz Mobile Pentium II
2 400mhz Mobile Pentium II
1 433mhz Mobile Pentium II

This may not seem significant until you consider there is no such thing as a 433 MHz Mobile Pentium II. It's marked "INTERNAL USE ONLY" and "SAMPLE". After discussing it with the population of #gentoo, I decided it would be my new laptop processor in my Thinkpad 600E (up from 400mhz). Anyone else have experience with engineering sample processors? there's no obvious tinkering like soldered wires or anything like that, and it seems stable enough on use. Isn't running any hotter than my 400mhz did.

Oddly, it has the same stepping, model, and family as a 400mhz, so it may just be a factory-overclocked one with a different setup in some way, but i'm no processor engineer.

In other hardware issues, anyone have any recommendations as far as BIOS supervisor password recovery? 2 or 3 of the boards that were working well were also protected. There's a guy online who claims he can get the output from a homemade device and then for a fee decode it, but i'd prefer to do it on my own since I don't really need the boards and just want to sell them off. CMOS battery removal won't do the trick on thinkpads, thanks to IBM's security-minded engineering. In fact, none of the boards came with CMOS batteries, though I had two spares already.

If anyone's interested in buying any mobile pentium II spares I have lying around though, let me know. I've also got spare boards, modems, casings, and fan assemblies for TP600/E/X series. If there were a local market for the things i'd refurb and sell them locally, but without that I've just got a fair stock of backup parts for the two I have, which is also nice. Hopefully I'll find work soon, since everything I do is turning into a way to turn a few bucks that nobody has the money around here to pay for. it's a pretty frustrating mindset.

Showed up around 1:10, and rolled out around 2:10 with a new black grille, a new Go Rhino pushbumper, and a repaired (for free) license plate bracket freshly re-bolted onto the front. Here's the pics:

  Before: front shot
  Before: side shot
  Before: angle shot
  After: with headlights on
  After: with headlights off

Next project: emergency lights, stealth-style with hide-a-strobes and flashing red lights.

Note: mind the line on the hood in the after shots, it was parked partially under the overhang of the roof where the rain was dripping on it.

1998 Ford Police Interceptor
nearly 127,000 miles
ex-San Antonio Police Department marked patrol car

Upon cashing in that insurance check for the accident in july, I went today and registered my car, and headed south from Sherman to Howe. On my way to find the shop the fire chief had told me about, the same one that DS's new pickup got its stealth lights installed at, I ran across it without even trying to find it.

Cop Stuff.

that's the name of the shop. They equip most of the region's police cars as well as other civil volunteers (i.e. volunteer firemen). Upon pulling up to their establishment, a metal building with about five bays and a back shed all full of brand new Police Interceptors in the process of being equipped/marked, as well as the whole of the business' parking and surrounding areas being so jammed with police cars of various departments and paint jobs, I had a feeling I'd come to the right place.

Immediately, one of the guys came out and asked if he could help me, and I asked about the Go Rhino frame-mounted pushbumpers, and he instantly quoted me a more than reasonable price including installation. Next, I asked if he had any lines on the black honeycomb grilles that come stock on the current issue interceptors, and he had a black one but not a honeycomb. Offered it to me (Brand new) for $25 installed, which I immediately accepted (I loathe chrome in the country...such a pain to clean), and I asked him about license plate brackets for the front of a current-style Crown Victoria. Less than half what the Ford dealer wants for it.

We went in and talked to the mechanic who handles scheduling, and the salesman wasn't sure if he could get me in before Christmas. With the number of cars in the surrounding lot, I believe it. The mechanic, upon finding out that I wanted work done on a 1998 model, was practically ready to hump my car upon finding out he was going to get to work on an old model, and rearranged things to get me in tomorrow just after lunch, and will be installing it while I wait. Naturally, they have pushbumpers for current-style Crown Victorias in stock all the time, so that's a non-issue.

Tomorrow, I should have before and after pics.

now that I've finally gotten everything reinstalled more or less (minus my data and a few network security tools, which are compiling right now), I'm more or less back up and running. compare and contrast:

Previous setup:
2.4.20-gentoo-r6 kernel
30GB IBM TravelStar hard drive
Lots of software

Current setup:
2.4.20-gentoo-r7 kernel
10GB IBM TravelStar hard drive (my spare)
small BeOS Developer Edition 1.1 partition for compatibility testing
software still compiling
GAIM being a bitch

well, at least Galeon worked this time. I'm still not clear what was wrong with it, but the untimely death of the old hard drive sort of made that point not really matter. It stopped once I updated my gnome libraries to 2.4 vintage, and it was clearly gconf related, but I'm still not really sure what it boiled down to being the problem or how to fix it.

let's hear it for something other than magnetic storage!