Page 3 - Starting a home computer repair business.

students. connections with school/college will give him a good enough foot hold to begin with. if he's good with his advertising they'll probably go to him first.

and $90 per hour?!! that's £50... wow! i was thinking of something more along the lines of £15/h ($27 US) + expenses, internet time, components, ect. WOW!

naw man 85 bucks an hour is common.

comp usa charges 100bucks to just look at it then about 80 bucks an hour.

alot of money, in it.

but anyway, does anyone have any advertising tips

meh...

dont spend lots of money on advertising, cheap is good, free is better. W.O.M. is gonna be your best bet.
start small (just around the school).
make sure you have permission from the school to put up things like a poster (do they have a notice board kind of thing?).
use business cards to give to customers (word can do them, im not sure about Works though).
make sure your price is affordable (how many students/teenagers do you know that can fork out $85+).

oh yeah , i was told that i dont need a businiss liscence here in alaska but you still can get them here, IDK there is some wierd laws or what not.

but does anyone know what i have to do to get like a business discount from say like new egg or like dell, when i order parts for bitches

you might not need a license but you need to be registered as a business, PCworld have a business section which are considerably cheaper than the public pcworld, we arent registered with them but i guess you will need to ring around and talk to companies to see how you get registered for discounts, they will prolly ask for information all you would need to do is get that info, from where i dunno

normally if your licenced (registered or whatever) you qualify for that, all it is is paperwork.

and who told you you don't need to be licenced? that sounds a bit iffy to me, being able to but not having to... check it out with some official or something.

i agree i did a bit of googleing and it seems prety much strict if you have a business you must be registered.

I used to fix computers on the side back in Minnesota. Just for reference, I used to charge $40 just to walk through the door. Plus, I charged $40/hr if I had to do any actual work. So, poking around the inside and then sitting in front of it would take me about 30 minutes. That's 60 bones just for doing what I do every day. I would itemize time and cost and hand deliver the bill if I had to take the machine home and do any work there. I would print prices from NewEgg if they needed new hardware. I guess it was pretty sweet making $40 an hour to surf NewEgg for parts.

Oh yeah, and people gladly paid my "budget friendly" rate. Actually, I think people were worried about taking it to a shop and paying for multiple hours at $70 an hour, and then getting raped on over-inflated parts costs. Some folks were sketchy, but they all thanked me in the end.

god, isn't it great to know so much about computers? People just shell out money....I'm not gonna have to bake bagels next summer (yay)

Yeah, sorry about my grammer on that rep..I just woke up. lol. "things that mystifies people" haha

it's just fine. now I just gotta get my A+ and N+ unless I can convince the people at this other place to let me "prove my worth" which I would hopefully do famously

well i got the information from my father, a lisenced pilot who runs his flight school and says you dont need it to run a business, but you do for like certain take write offs and waht not. hes also a lisenced real estate agent so hes got alot of dealing with the government.

BUT im starting to buy parts, i got me a pc repair kit and soon ill get the rest. but i need to know, should i get an external harddrive or is there like something that i can slam an internal drive into and then plug it into my computer and isolate it.

You could always get an external enclosure for an internal drive if you'd prefer to do it that way...then you could just mount the person's hard drive as a data drive on your box and extract files, but if their box isn't broke just get an external drive...but in either case maybe an enclosure would help you best.

ah ok thanks man,

but i have 1 more question.

would a laptop be a good investment for this business? it would be like cause i could bring all my testing software and jsut attach the computer like via usb but im not sure if it would be good, or any software that does diagnotics via a usb or say cat 5 cross over cable.

i remeber watching a review on a super portable ibm laptop, alot of battery and good portability, it was small but im not sure what it was called, help on this would be nice

you could do, but you'd likely spend most of the money you'd make before you made it. you can go all out on laptops and not really get what your looking for...

it would be a good thing to have, but id say go for a lower speck cheap one. (i myself am considering bodging together an old P3 one). although in reality you could just as easily do most of the stuff off a CD or portable HDD (and as pyro said you cna get caddies for internal IDE drives thus dropping the cost).