>What would you all consider a reasonable hourly rate for a network engineer to upgrade an Office installation to Office 2000 and rework a server internet connection from dial=up to frame relay?
>The network engineer is a CNE but not Cisco or Microsoft certified.

A single Office to Office2000 and just change dial-up to frame? I don't think an hourly rate should be applied. If an experienced tech were to do this job, it'd probably only take an hour and be done right. A less experienced tech (like our vendors) will take 3-4 hours. There's no reason to pay the less experienced tech more money simply because they took longer.

Ask the tech how long they think it'll take, set a flat fee and let them eat the cost if they take longer than estimated. There's no salaried employee in house that does this work?

ex1: we sent a computer back to our support vendor with a note "Can't connect to LAN", so they put a new network card in it, and send it back. It hasn't had any of the drivers installed because they never turned it on after installing the card. The machine still doesn't work right, so it goes back for more work. After the computer is finally working, they try to charge us for 3 repairs! (my thoughts: "Get us a new vendor")

ex2: we migrated an old Netware 3.12 server to a new Netware 5 server. The migration took 10 hours. The tech sat during that time playing Age of Empires II. After the rest of the upgrade, we were billed for a total of 16 (saturday) hours at $220 per hour. (I know some of the other 6 hours worth of work could have been done during the migration if the tech were less interested in his game)