Your first Commissioned Repair/job?
- Thread starter Logan
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Porthos
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True story...
My first "paid" job started out as a favor to a woman I worked with. Her desktop was acting up. Lets just say I ended up staying the night. I married her some time later and stayed married till she passed in 2003. Guess I was payed withha happy marrige and a step-son who is still with me to this day. RIP Linda.
My first "paid" job started out as a favor to a woman I worked with. Her desktop was acting up. Lets just say I ended up staying the night. I married her some time later and stayed married till she passed in 2003. Guess I was payed withha happy marrige and a step-son who is still with me to this day. RIP Linda.
PBComputer
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Being doing this over 16 years now I honestly can’t remember my first job.
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- Reaction score
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- Manchester UK
I can't remember my 1st job from last week, yet alone when I first started in this game lol.
I do however, remember my first pc build.
I used to do a lot of car boot sales (swap meets), and a elderly gentleman used to use me for differing bits and pieces. He asked me to build him a pc up.
Fast forward a good few years later, and I receive a call off his wife. To say that Geoff had passed, he still used that same machine up until his passing, and she wanted to know if I minded that the machine was given to their son. He had followed me all these years, and was happy that I had started officially, and was doing well.
I do however, remember my first pc build.
I used to do a lot of car boot sales (swap meets), and a elderly gentleman used to use me for differing bits and pieces. He asked me to build him a pc up.
Fast forward a good few years later, and I receive a call off his wife. To say that Geoff had passed, he still used that same machine up until his passing, and she wanted to know if I minded that the machine was given to their son. He had followed me all these years, and was happy that I had started officially, and was doing well.
All I remember is when I started I didn't have near as much equipment as I have now, there were far more frequent trips to the store to pick up tools needed to do work.
You don't have to buy everything at once buy as needed. I now use a 900$ store solution for my tools but I started with a backpack I already had.
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You don't have to buy everything at once buy as needed. I now use a 900$ store solution for my tools but I started with a backpack I already had.
Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk
GTP
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My first "paid" job was my hairdresser!
I was getting a cut when the PC stopped working. Can't remember what the problem was (PSU?) so got free haircut and some cash.
Sent from my S6 in the beige bra section of K-Mart with one hand down my underpants......
I was getting a cut when the PC stopped working. Can't remember what the problem was (PSU?) so got free haircut and some cash.
Sent from my S6 in the beige bra section of K-Mart with one hand down my underpants......
Markverhyden
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FTFY. LOL!!!
My first real business customer was some 15 years ago when I was working at CompUSA. A local dentist who brought his computers to CompUSA, which I worked on. Back then CompUSA didn't understand, stupidly, the value of B2B service. He called me one day asking if I'd work with him directly onsite, he had a computer with an apparent malware problem. Onsite, the office manager/hygienist, Isabel, a Brazilian woman, pointed me to the offending machine. Started working on it. Not long after, she started cussing up a storm to another Brazilian employee about something, as in the air was blue. My parents are American but met and married in Brazil. Having spent a good part of my childhood there I was, and still am, quite fluent.
Cleaned everything up, was a browser hijack kind of thing. Isabel came up and asked me what I did. I told her in Portuguese I had blessed the machine, Eu abençoei a máquina. Thought she was going to crack the tiles her jaw fell so fast as I understood everything she said before.
sapphirescales
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I'm younger than a lot of guys on here (born in '91 - started doing computer repair in the early 2000's). I ended up doing a nuke n' pave on a teacher's computer. It was pretty easy as they already had the Windows reinstall CD's from the manufacturer so I didn't have to worry about drivers or anything. The difficult part was backing up their data. Their computer was too old to have a CD drive and they had far too much data for a floppy drive and no USB ports...it was a laptop so I couldn't install a CD drive either. I ended up using an external ZIP drive with a parallel port to back up their data. Had to drive all the way to Seattle (about an hour away from me at the time) to buy it too and it was expensive.
The kicker was that even after doing a nuke n' pave the thing was still super slow. It's likely that the drive was failing but I didn't know how to run hard drive diagnostics at the time. I didn't even charge enough to cover the ZIP drive or the gas to get to Seattle to buy it and I seriously wondered whether computer repair was worth it. But I trudged on, kept fixing things, and started making a tidy profit.
The kicker was that even after doing a nuke n' pave the thing was still super slow. It's likely that the drive was failing but I didn't know how to run hard drive diagnostics at the time. I didn't even charge enough to cover the ZIP drive or the gas to get to Seattle to buy it and I seriously wondered whether computer repair was worth it. But I trudged on, kept fixing things, and started making a tidy profit.
DRPCNZ
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- Moerewa, New Zealand
1975 had to do some programming changes in CP/M for a company that was selling up and changing hands. Two months earlier this business had some programming done which cost them $2 grand. As a 16 year old I got paid $1000.00 for this job. The price was set by the Business owner, when he asked me how much I said what do you think it's worth. We were both happy with the price
Wow!
I don't remember what I did first when I started my job. Been over 7 years.
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ComputerRepairTech
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I know it was in the 90's, i'm pretty sure it was a simple virus removal. What was the load method back then... some win.ini file with a load= entry.
Edit: yeah I think thats right, it was either load= or run= I don't remember the difference.
Edit2: No wait, it was in the 80's, I was like 7-8 years old and a friends dad paid me a few bucks to show him how to load a program from a disk, he had just got one of those huge external floppy drives and it was a commodore 128 I think the standard load "*" or something like that wasnt working and I had to use some kind of file browsing command or something I dont remember xD.
Edit: yeah I think thats right, it was either load= or run= I don't remember the difference.
Edit2: No wait, it was in the 80's, I was like 7-8 years old and a friends dad paid me a few bucks to show him how to load a program from a disk, he had just got one of those huge external floppy drives and it was a commodore 128 I think the standard load "*" or something like that wasnt working and I had to use some kind of file browsing command or something I dont remember xD.
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fencepost
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Arguably my first was being a "User Consultant" student IT support back in college in the late '80s, though there was no PC repair - it was all helping people with using the existing systems.
fastremotehelp.com
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I did a clean install of Windows 95, via an external zip drive with a parallel port interface. I copied over their data first, then the boot with a DOS floppy, then the clean install. A 3 hour onsite job, I think I charged $50.
It was to repair a Digital Vax system. Just needed to replace a couple vacuum tubes in the power supply. It was a pretty new system and I had just ventured out on my own. 40 year anniversary just around the corner and retirement in two years.
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fencepost
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Those were the systems I was helping with....
