>Yes. We probably wouldn't balk at the $125 for the 2 hours of server/frame work, but $125/hr for office upgrades is nuts. I would think more in the range of a $35-40/hr for someone's lackey to come do that work. After all, the upgrade can be done by an inexperienced home user. The only reason you'd pay someone is because you just don't feel like doing it yourself.

Hi Michael, John,

I don't know that I would agree with that. I've had the lackey come in at half the price of the expert, and it just endend up taking twice as long, and I had to supervise the whole thing.

For me it's well worth the price to have an experienced tech come in and do the work right the first time. I know the job is done right, and I don't have to worry about some silly mistake an experienced tech might make. I really don't want to explain to my boss that all of 10 emloyees get to sit and drink coffee in the lunch room for 4 hours on Monday because I hired a tech who botched the whole thing.

Also, at least in my office, we have a lot of customization to get all the software to work the way we want. I just upgraded WordPerfect on the first machine, I spent 4 hours dragging all the custom crap over and figuring out how to make the rest of the upgrade easier. I wouldn't expect an inexperienced tech to figure it out.

just my $.02

hth

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>I think i'd consider having his expertise for the server/frame work. Have someone's kid spend a few hours on a saturday, and give him $200. Seriously, every Office upgrade *i've* ever seen is basically a point&click operation. (actually: point-click-restart-click some more-restart again) Also consider that if it takes 30 minutes to run the upgrade wizard on one machine, that it really shouldn't take 5 hours to do 10 machines. Click upgrade, hop over to the next desk, click upgrade, etc. With more than one licensed CD, it's usually possible to do 3-4 machines at once. 2-2.5 hours for the Office installations- multitasking should apply to the tech for $125/hr.