I bought a 1 tb m.2 ssd for far less then half that price. Also would you pay $250 for a solid state hard drive that’s only 480gb that’s “reformatted”
It honestly feels like they’re just preying on I knowledgeable boomers.
A 5 minute YouTube video could help better.
Thoughts?
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Small town computer stores are still like this. Probably the same guy who started a computer shop in the early 90’s and still does his own ads using clip art. My home town has a few of these guys. They have what remains of their clientele then they’ll retire. Great places to get some old retro tech tho. I have a few old pc’s for old games, these type of stores don’t throw old ram or graphics cards out. Just bought an old (working, never used) 3dfx Voodoo3 card from one that was retiring. $15, money well spent.
Lol, I bought a Dell Optiplex with a 500GB SSD 8GB of ram and a 3770S for $42 before tax on eBay. What a scam.
In a relevant note, a couple of weeks ago, someone asked me to fix their slow laptop. And the fix is just a simple nvme SSD upgrade.
Man this is more expensive than what I charge. You can tell the guy is old school if they are calling it a solid state hard drive, unless he is actually using those. Hopefully it’s actual SSDs. I just did a 512GB SSD and 8GB RAM upgrade on an older Dell Inspiron, with a fresh install of Windows 10 and all drivers and updates installed. I also repasted the CPU. Guy paid $105.
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It’s a shop for boomers probably. Most of the reviewers on their google reviews seem to be of that age and are more or less happy with the services. Let them be.
I bet he will put $25 worth Sata3 SSD, or even worse: $15 worth used Sata3.
My dad owns a small engineering firm and just upgraded all their laptops. He asked if I wanted one of the old ones because they were just sitting unused. The one I got has a 6th Gen i7 and had 8gb of ram. I upgraded it to 16gb of ram and swapped the hard drive for a 480gb SSD which in total cost me maybe $40 and the computer is surprisingly usable. I have it hooked up to a 6TB hard drive I already had in a USB enclosure and I am using it as my Plex server. My dad was blown away how cheap it was for me to upgrade it and did the same thing to one of the other laptops he had. It actually works great for me as a Plex server, I was using my old gaming PC as my server for awhile but the laptop has worked just as well if not even better and is virtually quiet and uses much less power.
When i lived in a small town in idaho i would reformat peoples computers for $150. My only competition was geek squad. I did anything they did for less. I was working a full time job as a sales rep for tmobile at a call center too. But making the $150 for pressing F11 or F8 at bootup was hilarious to me. Customers were happy to pay it. I didn’t feel bad either, it took a lot of time to learn how easy it was to fix it. So they were paying for the years of trial and error i had in my teens because I played with computers and learned
I charge $100/hr on the side from time to time when I need extra cash or an old client needs something.
They are all happy to pay it.
Time, skill and parts aren’t free.
Go check out how much Best Buy charges for the above services or how they bind people to shit like Total Tech Support.
Just because *you* know how to google something, parse that information into a useable format and (possibly) complete the job does not mean that 99% of the rest of the world does. Same goes for terminology.
All the above terms are understandable to most people, and really, anyone calling out “SSD hard drive” are being fuckin’ pedantic.
The prices on their website are wild
Sorry, Mac story butttttt……
I took my wife’s old 2017 iMac which has a gorgeous 5k 27” display but outdated internals and slapped an SSD and upgraded the memory from 4GB to 64GB and it’s like a new computer now.
My thoughts are it isn’t a service for me or targeting me. The type of person they are targeting probably would notice a substantial speed improvement by moving to a SSD and isn’t really going to know how to copy everything over easily. A couple hundred may be worth it to them, and if people are willing to pay it, know what they are getting and happy with the results, good for them.
Somewhere there’s probably people in a woodworking subreddit laughing about how much I spent on a desk, or am apiarist who can’t believe what I pay on honey.
Not predatory at all. They’re offering a service, and the hourly rate doesn’t look bad to me. I used to work on an IT help desk that charged $275 per hour. So this guy’s probably charging less than that AND throwing in an SSD for free? Not bad at all.
If you send your grandpa a YouTube video and tell him to upgrade his own PC with an SSD he’s probably going to accidentally brick it. Giving this guy a couple hundred bucks to do it right is an excellent idea.
I would post this to r/DataHorder but they would murder me.
It really is genius because 100% that computer will be faster than it ever has been in all the ways a boomer would use the PC so it isn’t a scam , it is providing exactly the benefits someone would be looking for
It may be a rip off , but you are getting your PC sped the fuck up for less than buying a new one