Time charges

[lazzo71]

Hi all,
I am wondering what part of your time do you charge the customer for. I have a standard, by the hour charge, though when I set up a PC for AV or AS work, it's basically click and then walk away, come back an hour or two later and it's all done.
Do you guys charge for that scan time or just for the "in front of PC" time?
Would it be acceptable to have a sset charge for certain operations ie: formatting etc.

 

[Maddiebeagle]

When I do 100% of the work in a customer's home, they get charged even when I'm sitting there watching the scanning going on.

When I do the work back at my workshop, I only charge for the time I am actively working at the computer. I can work on 2-3 other computers at the same time, so that seems fair to me.

P.S. I usually put a "cap" on my labor fees. I know it doesn't make sense to charge somebody $200 to fix an 8 year old computer when they can go buy a new one for $250. Data recovery is a different story...

 

[tkrabec]

Before I go to work on a machine I try to get an approximate age of the machine, then depending on the age and other questions I may recommend the person get another machine.

 

[hawks5999]

Before I go to work on a machine I try to get an approximate age of the machine, then depending on the age and other questions I may recommend the person get another machine.

...and hopefully you are sitting on a stock of machines to sell to them with a config charge

 

[Blues]

Just something I had happen since you mentioned virus scanning. I had a drive that failed a SMART test and was just giving troubles had a drive to swap with so I did and it worked. I recently began recovery process of the old bad drive. The drive was a 30GB 4200 RPM laptop HDD and before I will copy or move files I will scan it for viruses. This drive took nearly 2 days to complete the scan and found over 6,000 infections. I will add that 75% or more were in a recovery bit from when someone else had worked on it and used ERD. Those ERD recovery files should not have been infecting the drive but who all knows. I was just mostly amazed when after the first 24 hours the drive was still scanning.

 

[tkrabec]

...and hopefully you are sitting on a stock of machines to sell to them with a config charge

I've got a few, and a limited source, but it's all good. I get clean p4 2.4 with 512 and a 20-40gb HD, perfect for my audience.

 

[nonchalant]

I recently began recovery process of the old bad drive. This drive took nearly 2 days to complete the scan

I had a drive recently that took about 4 days to complete the recovery process (using getdataback). Diagnostics revealed there was nothing wrong with the drive either. And to top it off the recovery found virtually nothing worth recovering..

 

[Nathan H]

Charges for data Recovery

nonchalant,

How did you charge for that one?

I had a similar experience, a Chap had given me his SD card, he had Pictures of his family's holiday 8 weeks prior on it that he wanted recovered ( His wife and Son were killed by a drunk driver on their way home)

I had ran a few programs non stop for 4 days and found nothing, I felt awfully, giving him a bill and him not getting anything for.

He paid, then he told me he had reformatted the card in his camera about 10 times to see if that would get his pics back - before calling me, (If he had told me I would have saved him some cash - "nowt recoverable there"

But just wondered what others charge for data recovery, and do you have a separate fee for successful and unsuccessfully recoveries.

 

[ClickRight]

Any unrecoverable data / computer that's not fixable I charge 1 hour labour for looking at the device/comptuer. If a computer is not worth repair and the customer wants their files backed up onto a CD/DVD, it's 1 hour labour for looking at the machine, then usually about .5 hours for doing the backup.