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Originally Posted by Carbonated_Brains
I was thinking of advertising an emergency recovery service to students. Call me at 2AM the night before it's due if you lose your thesis or something.
Besides, if I can offer high-quality repairs at a cheaper price than just about anybody (to students, who never have time, and have their parents' money) maybe I can get some volume business.
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I did this for side money. It does not pay well. Furthermore it can become frustrating once you uncover the morass that causes many problems - clone machines assembled by independent builders with hardware that has incompatibilities. You end up confronting the mess the assembler encountered, kludged around, and then left just barely working. Sometimes you fix something only to encounter that same screwy problem.
My solution for most people was to buy brand name computers. Rarely was I ever called back. Mostly then spent more time teaching them how to avoid or fix the silly little virus or spyware problem while sitting around waiting for the machine to fix itself.
First off, if doing computer repair, have them bring it to your shop. IOW you need a shop. Clone computers just make life miserable for repairmen. Better to be miserable where you can control the time applied to that machine.
BTW, how do many universities solve this problem? They require all students to buy a default machine. They have a campus repair shop staffed with students. Any student with simple training can be a computer reapirman - which is made easy enough because everyone uses the same machines.