I had a friend drop off his friend's machine (it's a compaq presario) that wanted me to fix it.
As you know I own my own business, so it is my intention of charging the friend of a friend's to do this
After 3 months of having it sit around because I could not get video to work, i pulled it out yesterday and was determined to get it up.
I had located a dead presario from another client that wanted me to dispose of it. his config has a Bad CPU and a bad ram slot. the CPU also is particular to these boards too. So I couldn't put this CPU in it and have it start. Well, to make a long story short on this, they are the same boards exactly, but the multipliers are set by the BIOS.
Instead of trying to get that board working, I found out the bad chips on the other client's (my friend's friend) were what i needed to fix. so about 5 hours later of soldering and reflowing traces, i got the system up and running (it was pretty much 5 hours of testing AND soldering. so it was REALLY fun [notice sarcasm])
I got the system up, i installed the OS and everything on a spare drive to get it up to where I could flash the BIOS to an up-to-date version. I pulled RAM from my G3 and put it into it.
anyway, i need to know what to charge for this, since I had to do all the troubleshooting. I normally charge on a per-case basis, not hourly, but this is outside what I consider "Normal" service.
The machine specs are :
566Mhz Celeron
66Mhz MLB bus
512MB or "MY" Memory (other than that, none, he gave me none)
I had to furnish my own heat sink, Memory, and hard drive, as well as CD-Rom and floppy.
It was just a scrap of metal when I got it
I will probably end up keeping the machine since the client probably won't pay what I SHOULD be charging him. but I still want to know
How much would this service be if I were to just charge for the reflow and IC Chip replacements?
There were 5 IC Chips I had to replace (some small) i has to replace some resisters, and I had to reflow a dozen or so joints.
I did laptop repair on my own for about 6 months, and I've had to do what you did, to my own machines on occasion (2 laptops, several vintage macs, etc).
I don't usually bill for testing my own repairs, I usually charge $50 per hour in half hour increments with a one hour minimum. $50 just to look it over for initial diagnostics, and if it's a simple software thing I find and can fix during the first hour, that's all they pay.
Sometimes that works out very much to my advantage, for instance, if it's a DOA laptop whose RAM wasn't seated properly because it was jostled around too much. That's about 10 minutes to fix.
Any part that I need to buy, I clear with the customer first. I charge 25% over my cost on parts.
Friends get parts at 10% over cost, and a discounted labor rate of $30 per hour.
Really good friends get parts at cost and if it's a simple fix that takes less than 30 minutes and doesn't cost me anything, like re-seating RAM or cleaning the vents of their heatsink and putting new thermal grease on it, I'll settle for some Guinness or a meal at some steakhouse.
I say give the customer a few options:
1) $75-$100 gets it without any of "your" personal stuff on it. and tell him it will work if he buys a heat sink, RAM and HDD for it. Tell him you do not guarantee that customer-bought parts will work if he asks you to install them.
2) Go find prices for all the stuff you need, and charge him markup on parts, on top of $75-$100. Sounds like it will be at least $150 worth of parts if you cheap out with a refurbished 20-40GB laptop HDD, 256MB RAM, and a heatsink. Laptops without CD or Floppy are not that bad, but find prices and give him the price breakdown. $250 gets it back with the RAM, HS and HDD. $325 gets it with the CD/FDD drives as well. etc.
That said... You have a lessons to learn from all this.
It's a good idea to let your customers give you a maximum repair amount where you will call them before proceeding if your estimate exceeds that amount.
i used a donor machine to get the chips. the machine cost me all of $25 for it. so it wouldn't be a big loss, however i had put in more hours than the machine is worth, and through-out the whole process the guy has given me the all "okay" to do what was necessary. I have no idea what this guy wants this machine for. it's like he has grown a personal attachment on it.
If worse comes to worse, i would just charge him $100 for it all and write it off as a project that i was able to complete. I still want to know ballpark price and see what I WOULD HAVE gotten.
a bad solution to his problem. A dead logic board on a laptop that's what? 8 years old? There's no way your soldering time would cost less than picking up another working unit on ebay. I don't mean a logic board, you could very likely have picked up a complete unit on ebay for far less than your time is worth.
That's the lesson you should have learned, soldering time is only for when the hardware can't be bought for replacement at less than the cost of your labor. If it were something like a power jack, or a new inverter board, and you needed to solder a couple leads, then it's worth the time, because that's an easy repair. You can solder traces like that on a logic board? You have skills, but you need to know when to use them.
I do understand that you've got a working laptop for your customer now, but at this point, the only results are bad. Either you charge your customer full price, and risk losing them as a customer over an excessive bill, or you take a labor cut, they pay for the laptop, and you lose on a lot of time put into it. If they let you keep the laptop, it's so out of date, the only use it will be is for parts to fix another one if it comes in broken, but this time you won't need solder.
I also fix computers for a living.
I charge $25 an hour, plus parts cost (including a 5% markup), so I would say do the same, but since you charge per-case, I dont really know. Havnt been in the buissness long, so I really cant help
sorry.
-digital
It's actually not a laptop, it's a desktop. from around 2000. it was not hard to work with the small parts, it was the tinning and everything that took so much time. I did my best on it, and the guy gave me the go ahead about last tuesday to take the last shot at it. I told him it could cost quite a bit, depending on how quick it would take. I still need to contact him. I will let you know what the reply is. I did not do this w/o the client knowing it. He told me to do whatever it took. I don't think he understands how much it costs to do something like this....
The guy has NEVER paid for his computer to be repaired, he has always had a friend do it. So He is probably thinking that this will be just a $100 job and he will walk away with it at that price.
I think this guy has a rude awakening when he find how much people charge for this...
i just got off the phone with the client. Charity it is. I guess i will get it ready for my mom's pro-life thriftshop. At least they will be able to sell it to a family that really needs it. They price stuff way down because they are in a poor neighborhood. I believe I have an extra copy of Windows 2k Pro that I can throw on it (legit. bought the licenses at auction NIB) and i will do the updates. I got a few games I can throw into it too. that will be great for the kid's of the people that will get it.
As far as doing the work. I don't mind doing the work if it will go to charity, i would just hate doing it and then underselling to someone who really doesn't need the machine. he just bought a computer too. so I don't know what he would do with this.
I can at least chaulk it up to finishing a project that needed to be done. I still gotta get that P II 300MHz done for the thriftshop also...
Rather than get into repair, I just have a desire to pick up a new shirt. I don't usually ask to be paid for helping fix computers, but the businesses I help tend to pay me something anyway.
I'm currently in a similar boat, were a laptop that I bought used was diagnosed with bad IC chips -
My question is, how did you figure out which ones were bad, and which ones needed replacement? Pictures of the 'bad' ones compared to good?
Also how hard of a task would you consider it? I may be able to pick up some parts and fix it up, but it seems there is a dilema of cost vs time.
Thanks.
I took them off the board and they literally disintegrated. That's how I concluded that it was a pretty bad surge that hit it. The main heat dissipater on the board was even cooked (the BIG Heatsink for the regulator) and that had to be replaced.
The only things I tested were traces. My dad helped me with finding some of the subtler chips that were hard to figure out.