At 06:56 AM 2/13/2006, Thane Sherrington (S) typed:
So when you reinstall Windows, do you reinstall all their apps and
transfer data as part of the regular job?
Most mom/pop shops do NOT putting the onus on the owner to have
sufficient backups when everyone knows that home lusers don't backup
nearly enough. Heck even MSFT doesn't install a shortcut to ntbackup
on the start menu & XP Home does NOT have ASR [automatic system
recovery] feature anyway so what good is it?
If so, what sort of cost would I be looking at to bring in a
computer and have Windows XP with three users and six apps and data
restored? I'm just wondering if I'm charging way too little.
You probably are. There is a shop here in this little town that sells
systems without AV software knowing that the client is going on the
internet as a nOOb so they know that they'll get the machine back.
They'll do a re-install for $50 but the client loses everything from
Internet setup, email, pics of the grandkids & etc. but what do they
care? Another shop charged a chiropractor $250 to cleanup Happy99 by
doing a wipe & re-install without telling him that he was going to
lose all his data then sent the laptop back at 640x480 when the
native res was 800x600 so it looked like crap. He took the laptop
back & they soaked him for another $200 & still gave the machine at
640x480. While bidding on a small 5 workstation network for him he
asked me if I could fix his laptop display while he ran out to get
the snail mail & coffee. He thought he was testing me. I had it fixed
before he was out of the driveway but he didn't believe me until he
saw it for himself and when he did he asked me how much I wanted for
the network job [I should've upped my price right there] then he
wrote me a check on the spot. I told him I could've fixed Happy99 for
$50 & he wouldn't have lost all his data nor would the screen have
gotten messed up. In this little college town with 4 or 5 mom/pop
shops you'd think that I wouldn't have anything to do yet I get calls
everyday & if the people that call can't give a reference from a
previous client then I refuse to do business with them. FWIW I don't
advertise in the Yellow Pages & I don't even list Svenska Computing
in the white pages but the calls still keep coming in. Darned word of
mouth anyway. ;-)
So while in a few rare cases a wipe & re-install is necessary it
certainly is NOT req'd in all cases. I never charge more than $200
USD to cleanup a system even if that means doing a wipe & re-install
but I also re-install as many of the apps as I can salvaging as much
of their data as I can but only after I try to clean the sucker as
thoroughly as I can. This is what I would do for my own machine(s)
[even tho I don't surf the shady sites & have more than 1 backup]
therefore I believe the clients deserve the same treatment.
Heck the reason I developed XpPe was so I could clean up NTFS systems
but why would I bother do that if I was going to take the wipe &
re-install route every time? There are bugs that shut down AV apps &
websites that I can cleanup in 5 min with my XpPe disk that I could
never clean on the system otherwise without having to pull the HD &
put it in another system on the bench.
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a Windows Xp based
Diagnostic & Recovery CD
<http://www.xppe.com/>
