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Anyone else tried something like this? Any advice, particularly on what rate to charge?

I did just this sort of thing for a while. It was a nice bit of spare change for toys, but every job involved at least a couple hours of just simply cleaning up garbage: old, not quite uninstalled programs, spyware/adware, etc. And it's tricky to figure out what is actually a needed part and what's junk on someone else's computer. Though they usually have the manuals (for software they actually bought), it's usually in a box under the stairs or some such.

I charged (and still do on the rare occasions I do this sort of thing these days) $50 an hour for residential and $100 an hour for business calls. Mininum of 4 hours on the first visit (for that clean up), and two hours for follow-up visits. And the owner needs to be close at hand to answer pesky questions about programs, such as "Which of these four sets of digital camera software packages do you actually use?"

Oh, and I try to make an image of the drive (usually on my laptop) before I start poking. Just in case.

[Edit: Ooh! I'm an enthusiast!]

-jk


Edited by jmwking (19/07/2004 16:34)