Increasingly longer times to fix problems
It just dawned on me, that some systems are requiring an increasing amount of time to fix.
I think its something like the 80/20 rule: I spend 80% of my time fixing 20% of the systems.
Maybe I’m a perfectionist, but when I stumble across a system that, say, involves difficulty in installing a printer driver, but it also needs an upgrade to SP2, then a virus and a malware scan, before I do the printer driver install… all up, at least 2 hours, then I feel I must do it… and often not doing it will cost even more time. But I feel uncomfortable charging for 2 or 3 hours work, when I was asked to fix a ‘simple’ problem.
Then there are the problems in getting around illegal copies of XP (which makes it difficult to install SP2… and many would say ‘rightly so’), but my main aim is to help… help my customers get the most out of their computers.
Many customers buy computers from ‘friends’ who have installed the illegal software… so they are not to blame for someone elses illegal actions, and they certainly don’t want to spend $200, just so they can upgrade a $200 computer to SP2.
And the number of badly configured computers seems to be increasing (its probably just my imagination).
Its going to get to the point where I will need to factor a higher quote for new customers, just because of the many unknowns in their systems (and asking if they have SP2, etc is mostly useless, as most don’t know if they have XP or 95).
I guess there is not much that can be done about the time it takes to do virus & spyware scans & SP2 upgrades.
Grumble, Grumble, Grumble.
Makes you wonder what Vista has in store.
Just dont work on illigal copies. if they ever need to do a relaod they cant and will have to go buy it anyway, also you tend to get what you payed fore, the sooner the customer learns this the better the problems we will be working on and the less time we will be spenign on jobs, eg it take approx 3X longer to repair and uprgade a boji copy of xp than an original and the cost should reflect that but whats to stop them from going out and and saying you worked on it and you put the boji version on. SO be Aware
Good point. I’ll give it a go… However, I’m still not at a stage where I can be too choosy.
At this stage, I’d still rather spend 2 or 3 hours (and getting paid for) working on a system, rather than tell the customer it will be $160 for winXP, plus $195 for me to install and configure it.
If I tell the customer it will be $400 for me to fix the boji version, then chances are they will either go elsewhere, or they will buy a newer PC.
At least business has picked up enough, that in a few months, I should soon be able to pick the jobs I want.