Hello people,

I see a lot of PC / technical discussion here, and no shortage of people who have run their own business.

This seems as good a place as any to post this.

I have been trying to get people to fill in a survey related to home PC support, the results of which are both to help me explore the possibility and to convince others of it. 🙂

I have checked the forum rules, and the closest of them seems to be this one:

**No Trade or business advertising – except bona fide retailers may respond to genuine enquiries from potential customers.**

I think I am ok in this case, as there is no business and I am really just asking for opinions.

The survey just has 17 questions, will take about two minutes to fill out, and doesn’t ask for email address or anything. This is hosted on my own web space (defunct ‘band that never was’ homepage, hence somewhat unusual name).

Please fill it in if you have a moment.

PC Support survey

Please reply here if you have any opinions to offer related to this, even if it’s just ‘forget it, I tried it and it was hell’, or ‘anyone paying for that these days is an idiot’!

It may well be that everyone gets their friend, cousin, son or daughter to do this kind of thing today, and it’s just not going to work! 🙂

Cheers

Good luck.

I started at a small local PC shop years back and even before the internetz were in every house it was a struggle. These days you will really have to go some – people will come in to handle your stock and buy from ebuyer, dell wherever. There was no PC World or many computers in Dixons et al then either.

We did OK on service – digging people out of their own problems, building small networks (mainly Novell, NT 3.1 etc.), and app support for small business but I was never going to get rich on it. The worst part is the (to use a bike shop analogy) ‘shopper with a puncture’ that is 99% of your work – something dreadful to work on and sort out that the owner believes you should fix for nowt in case he decides to buy a PC off you (which you make 1% on to be even close to competitive).

If I were going to open a shop, I’d see if I could get an Apple franchise – there seem to be a few independents that just sell Apple stuff popping up that are doing reasonable trade.

I try and help my friends, but though they will still happily charge a ‘rate’ (admittedly m8’s) for the work I need work on my car/house/plumbing, they seemingly don’t see my time spent fixing their computers as having the same value.

Saw these guy visiting a local house :
http://www.pc-problems.biz/

I’m left wondering how you can charge some-one say £150, when a brand new reasonably upto date computer is £350? (I know you still need to spend time getting it configured, but ppl don’t see this)
I regularly come across ppl who will live with an issue for 6 months, than get it fixed.

EDIT: I have totally backed off doing friend of friend favours though, as everyone expect you to spend all your free time fixing their computers for free. Yet still moan when you tell them their HDD has totally failed and you can’t get their data back.. why is this suddenly my fault?

Just fixing PC’s won’t make you much money these days but repairing other items such as macs, phones, games consoles and AV equipment will open up your business to a wider audience. I do this as a sideline and mainly repair broken laptop screens, DC jacks and hard disks. Lots of people who used to have desktops now have laptops which are harder to diagnose and repair.

Oh god dont do it. As Z1ppy has said, people wont pay the money for what they class as small issues.

I’ve stopped fixing software issues for friends as its way too time consuming unless its quite a simple fix. Half the time now i just say back up what you want to keep on a USB stick/external drive and i’ll happily reinstall OS but I’m not sitting there goin through the registry with a fine tooth comb.

I’ve often toyed with the idea and never gone through with it for, well, the same fears that others have mentioned here.

I do a lot of freebies for people. I started doing it because I enjoyed it and because it’s nice to do someone a favour (and you never know when you might need one yourself). These days though, I do it largely to keep my hand in; it’s all good practice and gives you an otherwise impossible exposure to different hardware and software.

The problem with many IT types doing freebies (as opposed to ‘mates rates’ plumbers etc) is that we find it very hard to say no or ask for payment. It doesn’t do us any favours in the long term because people start to expect it and it deprecates the value of what we do.

So, whilst I still help people with issues, I do draw the line in certain circumstances. For a start, I’m happy to help, but you come to me. Telling people “yeah, bring it to me” instead of “yes, I’ll come and look at it” immediately weeds out the bottom-feeder pisstakers who baulk at the idea of having to put in the slightest bit of effort themselves. Similarly, “can you ring me?” – no, you ring me, I’m damned if I’m going to provide free support and pay for the privilege.

Kevin Bacon support – “my mate’s mum’s hairdresser’s daughter’s boyfriend’s PC doesn’t work” – has to be chargeable, no question, or you’ll get meithered to death by people you don’t know for ever more.

I could, and perhaps should be more mercenary about it, but as I say it’s not entirely altruistic.

Ha! Just waiting for Cougar to finish posting, then he’s very generously going to offer some remote assistance to my ailing machine (no, really)!

Hope I can return the favour at some point, somehow!

Interesting thread this!

I go through phases of thinking this is a good idea, usually when I’m fed up with the politics at work.
Then, I test the water by putting the work out and doing homers for mates, mates family, neighbours etc, then I realise what a nightmare it would be to do it for a living.

Never say never though. I follow this blog all about running a small tech support/PC repair business, and it’s full of some great ideas.

Home

Never know when I might need a wedding photographer. (-:

OP – I’ve looked at your survey but not filled it in; I don’t think I’m your target audience and I’d skew your results. If I had to answer ‘yes’ to questions like ‘would you pay someone to fix your computer’, I’d be looking for the nearest tall building.

I really wouldn’t – My stepbrother made some pocket money in the home computer market but he was just eating into his redundancy from *insert UK IT giant here*.

He made a few more bob working for local companies as outsourced IT, setting up IP phone (asterisk?) systems for them. He was working ‘with’ a mate who lived about 25 miles away, although they were separate business entities they would pass work to each other if it was in the others patch.

After doing all the hard work setting up the company and growing the business he went back to doing his old job as a contractor for enough money to buy a house at 25.

Edit: I shouldnt have filled in the survey but i did :$

Thanks for the replies so far people. A lot of good information to work with. Also thanks for filling the survey. I am not much of a facebook user (about 40 friends), so have few places to ask people.

Cougar, please go ahead and fill it in if you will.

A friend of mine who is paid a fair old sum for programming and who knowledge puts mine to shame several times over said the same thing. I don’t really consider it skewing the results. At the end of the day (as many replies in this thread are pointing out), it may just be that too many people out there know a fair bit about PCs for it to be a viable plan.

Further to that, there is not a thing I can’t support on the PC myself, but the temporary mobile broadband provision that I have mentioned would still be useful to me.

Every now and then BT screw up (sure… I am being nice to them for once). I bought a Vodaphone USB broadband dongle for this. The thing is, Vodaphone being every bit the pond scum that BT are, will charge you £15 for a certain amount of data transfer, which expires after 30 days. So to give myself access when BT screw up, I have to pay about £20 for the USB dongle, and then another £15 for access.

As much as I hate BT, they generally fix access after less than 48 hours. So paying someone a few pounds a day for a temporary replacement might be the best deal.

A lot of this is based on a local plumber service. You pay a fixed monthly fee, and for that get a certain amount of call outs per year.

So the idea is heading in a ‘pay this fee, and one way or another we make sure you get a PC doing what you want to do with one’ kind of direction.

Thanks again for all the advice and opinions people. I will be saving text from this thread and going through in more detail later!

Cheers

10-20 years ago it would have been a good idea. These days it would be madness to even think you could make anything other than pocket money at it.

Few reasons for you..

FAR too many people doing it already..

Those that are.. kids.. unemployed, doing it for peanuts.

Computer use is declining in the home as more and more services move over to mobile devices/smart tv’s..

Insurance costs are astronomical these days (are you willing to take the risk of a computer being damaged whilst in your possession and you having to replace it?)

Laptop prices rendering some almost throw away items not worth repairing.

Most clientèle using you because then know you, and expecting a reduced fee/free service.

The list is endless. The idea madness.

Sorry 🙁

I can’t see why anyone would go for a fixed fee service (computing or plumbing), the British gas type ones really only work as they’re a type of insurance as well (e.g. replace a failed boiler). I can’t see anyone willing to pay a fixed fee just in case they need a call-out though.

As for PC repair – as others have said there’s really not much money in it. A guy in our Desktop support team at work did it for a while last year for extra money in the evenings but it didn’t really go anywhere and he decided it wasn’t worth the hassle in the end. Can’t see doing it full-time would be viable enough to make a living from.

it may just be that too many people out there know a fair bit about PCs

There’s certainly plenty who think they do…!

I can’t see why anyone would go for a fixed fee service (computing

SoHo users spring to mind. Sole traders working from home, PC goes pop, who you gonna call?

There is still money to be made but you need to get your business model right.

Not many software programmers are good at running business you know.

Personally I like to rent a super doper computer at a rock bottom price where the HD is hot swappable (my data) and the computing upgraded periodically. A bit like mobile phone.