My guess is overlord.

Lol yeah you can make a bunch of money charging people to do simple stuff. Same with mechanics - they charge you an arm and a leg for a job that takes like 10 minutes.

Indeed; for evidence of this being - at least in the past - a much more common thing to do, the Haynes Manual is oft to be found in slightly older cars in the area where I live, where - at least in my opinion - people are more mechanically-minded than down where Stephen comes from.

The difference between a car and a PC, of course, is that there's a bit of a perception of a car as being made of pistons and valves, and if you sort of bang it a bit and then give it a twist with a spanner, it works.

A PC on the other hand is electrical, rather than mechanical, engineering, and it's all circuits and RAMs and mains-power, so most people probably don't want to have a bit of an amateur fumble around with the components.

The wonder of computers is that the user doesn't really need to care what goes on behind the scenes, or worry about "how it works;" it just does. And if it doesn't work how they think it should, or they want some work doing on it, they take the same approach as the trickier electronics in their cars; take it down to a Bloke in the Shop, who'll fix it.


They're paying $100 for peace of mind, (the bloke knows better than me, that's why I give him money, so I know my PC isn't going to break) and for not having to take time out of their day to worry about doing a task which to - to us, as computing enthusiasts - is intuitive. It's like a Travel Agent, or a mechanic.

Equally, if my lawnmower went wrong, or the engine in my car started grinding, I'd take it in to a mechanic, because I'm not a car enthusiast or a mechanical engineer.

Well, alright, in that specific case I may be lying, I'd have laid the damned thing out across the lawn and investigated the problem myself, but we're veering off topic at this point.

They just want to invent a bunch of reasons so that they can make a bigger profit off of you.

Sure. But that's essentially what you're giving them liberty to do if you don't want to learn basic maintenance tasks yourself, for whatever reason. The same as how a sandwich in a supermarket can cost £2.95 when it costs about £0.20 to make. Such is capitalism.

Is it ethical? That's debatable. I'd personally say no. But equally, doing menial tasks is nobody's idea of fun and I'd generally be okay with someone charging a sufficient amount of money that it's mentally "worth it" to take on people's menial, time-consuming but unstimulated maintenance tasks.

Just like everyone else said, it is all about peace of mind. These people don't spend their lives on computers like most of you. They probably don't even know what formatting a desktop even means, they just know they were told by their company to do so. I bet I know more about cars than you, and if you asked me to fix something that I would think as simple as hell to fix, and it would probably cost you $15 if you knew what you were doing, I would charge you $500.

You can buy windshield wipers for $7 and it will take you not even two seconds to snap on and off. So $7 and two seconds of you time to do. If you go to GoodYear they will charge you $70. It's just business.

Yeah thats my point - people charge hundreds for small and big jobs and not just big jobs. The question is not if I can charge $100 to spend 2 minutes and swap a processor - of course I can lie, claim it's a hard job and over charge someone. The question is SHOULD I.

There's a difference between chump change, a reasonable price, and then a ripoff. Not saying people should work for free or for next to nothing, but they shouldn't be charging hundreds of dollars and telling their customers they need this and that when they really don't.

I remember back in the day the Circuit City in my area was taking people's computers and giving them this long list of "repairs" needed when it was only something simple like a virus and all you had to do was maybe run a scan or do a system restore ( both of which take no more than 10 minutes ). Yet they would keep your computer for days to make it seem like they were doing so much work, and you'd get like a $200 bill because they're charging you for everything they did to your computer - even if you didn't need it. For example, they would've probably formatted your computer, but like I said, a scan or system restore usually does the trick, but they don't care, they're going to perform a bunch of tasks on your computer so the list of fees gets higher and higher.

You don't have to scam people in order to make a profit. There are businesses ( i.e. my mechanic ) who won't tell you you need 5 repairs done to your vehicle when you only need one. He was working alone when I first met him - now he has 6 workers and a security guard and so many cars at his shop there's barely enough room to walk around. I think I'll stick with someone trustworthy as opposed to some greedy con who will say and do whatever it takes to get every last dime out of me.

Also I'm confused as to why you said it wouldn't be worth their time. $10 to swap a processor? Hell, I'd do that all day every day. Like I said, it's a 2-3 minute job. Why couldn't I stop what I'm doing, make $10 and earn a potential future customer, then go back to whatever else it was I was doing? Exact same thing my mechanic does. If I show up with some maintenance task, he goes under the hood, and in a minute or two, he's done, he's paid, and I'm back off his lot. Instead of "hurr durr this will be extremely difficult, give me all the money in your wallet."

I put my AMD Phenom II on my motherboard, heatsink and reapplied thermal paste in no more than 5 minutes. 20-30 minutes? It probably took 20-30 minutes my very first time doing it because I had no idea what I was doing, but once you figure it out, this is nowhere near a half hour task. It doesn't take much to take a chip out of a box, pop the fan on, and plug it into the motherboard. And apparently Intel processors are just as easy:



My prices would never be to the point where I know I'm robbing the crap out of people. Charging someone $100-$200 for 5 minutes of my time is ridiculous unless that person absolutely insists on paying me that much.