Valuing your time when Fixing old PCs?

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chrispycrunch

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Feb 25, 2005
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I've recently come across two old dell pc's. I've fixed one up and sold it to a friend but I underpriced myself and my work :)

Dell 4300 P4 1.6Ghz, 256mb, 40gb hdd, geforce2- wiped out xp home and installed ubuntu. Load time was under a min vs 3+ min. I sold it for $70. Ebay listed it as $120+ delivery.

I have another desktop Dell 8100 P4 1.7Ghz, 128mb (RDRAM) 20gb hdd. It was sluggish in windows98ME but after a few tweaks. What should I sell it for, including a viewsonic 17" crt?

I'm just wondering if I am properly pricing in my time. The hardware value (i use ebay) is negligible. For example the 8100 is maybe $40+s/h on ebay!

Do you guys actually "make" money doing this? It's a hobby for me so I am not really in it for the money. Am really enjoying the tweaking, the fixing, and the value of linux :)
 
I agree. When you want to turn your hobby into something profitable, be careful that it doesnt become your job... cuz when it does, it'll become less enjoyable.
 
You can never make money if you are selling to friends.
It also depends on what you call fair price. One way to look at it is anything you get is more than you had. Especially if you were going to junk it.
 
You can also feel good about helping spread free software love and helping avoid polluting landfills with electronic waste :)
 
I charge $30/hr when fixing peoples stuff that are not friends/family, I have had tons of people come to me from word of mouth from fam/friends. It is almost always people who loaded up their rigs with spy-ware or a virus, sorry I am not going to spend 2-3 hours trying to fix your shit for free.

For building rigs it really depends on how much time I spent vs how much the rig cost and delivery or pickup etc.

Your time and gas are worth money, do not give these away for free or you will get abused.
 
I refuse to work on old computers because:

1) I can't charge what I'm worth because:

2) Generally, my work is worth at least 50% of the computer
 
For friends and fam, I only charge for parts; though, whenever they pay, they typically pay much more than the cost of the part(s), lol -- or they pay me back some other way (my cousin gets me OEM car parts for cheap). I typically don't charge because I take my sweet time. For example, there's a Laptop on my workbench, and its been there for about 2 months now, lol. Oh, one thing I don't typically do is a house call. I usually have them bring the PC in, regardless if its a laptop or desktop.
 
chrispycrunch said:
I've recently come across two old dell pc's. I've fixed one up and sold it to a friend but I underpriced myself and my work :)

Dell 4300 P4 1.6Ghz, 256mb, 40gb hdd, geforce2- wiped out xp home and installed ubuntu. Load time was under a min vs 3+ min. I sold it for $70. Ebay listed it as $120+ delivery.

I have another desktop Dell 8100 P4 1.7Ghz, 128mb (RDRAM) 20gb hdd. It was sluggish in windows98ME but after a few tweaks. What should I sell it for, including a viewsonic 17" crt?

I'm just wondering if I am properly pricing in my time. The hardware value (i use ebay) is negligible. For example the 8100 is maybe $40+s/h on ebay!

Do you guys actually "make" money doing this? It's a hobby for me so I am not really in it for the money. Am really enjoying the tweaking, the fixing, and the value of linux :)
Click to expand...


Well if you enjoy it. :)

I'm trying to sell my old rig to a buddy for $120.00. X2 5600+, X800Pro, 2GB DDR2-800, GA-M55SLI-S4, Antec NeoPower 480w. Pretty good deal.
 
almost all of my family has a computer from me and they were all free to them becuase they were old to me, but with the free computer they all owe me favors if/when I need them.
 
Family I work for free, but otherwise I charge $40/hour. That being said I'm more than willing to make exceptions on a case by case basis. Mainly, I bill based on the time that I'm "working", and I'm pretty generous about that. There are some jobs that are just time consuming by nature but are light on the workload mainly due to being heavy on the scans or file copying or anything else that basically doesn't require me to do anything but just takes a ton of time. I usually try to take the rig home with me so that my time isn't monopolized while this takes place and then I give them a break on the price otherwise I meet them somewhere in the middle.

Definitely don't work for free, but on the other hand giving someone a deal and getting repeat business is often better than charging more for a one time job, IMO.
 
Nanan said:
*snip*

Your time and gas are worth money, do not give these away for free or you will get abused.
Click to expand...

QFT. I used to fix PC's for free (I also get a lot of work via word of mouth) if it was just something simple and I didn't travel far. One day I sat down and calculated how much money I had lost by doing that and it was a suprisable amount. I now charge a minimum of 1 hour no matter if it takes 5 minutes or 1 hour. People are not just paying you for the time it takes to complete "job x" but also for all the time and effort it has taken you to build up the expertise to be able to do that job. Just because it only takes 5 minutes to fix doesn't mean it's only worth 5 minutes of payable time if you've spent hours researching the problem and building the skills to be able to do the job. I tell people my rates up front before I even get into the car and then it's up to them to take it or leave it.
 
Thanks guys. The next sale is to a colleague, not a friend, so I'll charge factoring in bare cost of parts and a bit of the time spent fixing it up.

Reviving old PCs does not make money. Recovering data though does, but that might be limited to labs over in California. I could see a business for high-end HTPCs though!

Funny thing about friends/family and not making money. That's all good and well, and it's a good idea for taking your sweet time to fix it for them. But like with strangers, with family, if you're too nice and too eager to help them out, they WILL take advantage of you and will ask for more. Sometimes favors are returned, but sometimes they aren't.

I am definitely spreading the free-OS love but in my latest small project build, having 128mb memory. I thought I could revive win98/winME but it looks like it's going to need W2K. The problem with win98 on this machine is defrag/scandisk unable to run successfully.
 
My previous employer thought my time was worth 88 buck an hour. To bad that's not what he paid me only what he charged the clients to fix there computers/networks.
 
I've been building computers for free (Minus cost of parts and stuff) just because I enjoy it... they pay for a dinner and it takes me a couple hours to build/install/test

Wooo
 
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