a co-worker was complaining that she had to take her son's brand new machine into a shop to get it repaired.
Her son had broken some pins off the mb while trying to do some upgrade. I want to say he broke a pci slot or maybe a memory slot.
He found the part number and bought a new one online and it wouldn't boot up. so he figured he hosed something else and got her to take it in.
She was complaining because they were going to charge her 200 bucks to "fix it" .

I said no way there is anything that would cost 200 bucks and she said they had to ship it somewhere.
So I asked for the specs and where she bought it from and did some searching.

Come to find out they had a newer amd chip on an old mb that didn't support it with the factory bios.
AMD and the mb place will upgrade it for free. AMD will even ship you a chip so you can boot it up and upgrade the bios and you can ship it back when done.

She went back to the place and did the poor person act and said she couldn't afford it right now.
ordered the cpu that amd would loan you so she could fix it the next day instead of waiting 2 weeks.

I mean I get you gotta make a buck, but that was just insane to me. I can't even justify that in my head like I can for mechanic shops.
Here the shop literally could get it done for free and they wanted 200 bucks.

Sounds like an asshole tax.

Exactly how much should their time be worth?

Sounds like the shop didn't want to work on it.

How much per hour should the shop charge to cover their overhead?  

You know time has value correct?

again, I said I get that.
mechanic shops will charge more due to overhead then I can do the work.

But should they get 100 bucks an hour? 1000?
because the job was literally 15 min maybe. Lets call it 30 min because I had to setup the bootable usb.

so they make 400 bucks an hour on this job? is that right?

sorry, there is reasonable. maybe 100 bucks an hour for something someone can't do or doesn't have the tools for.

400 bucks an hour is ripping people off. With no parts out of pocket at all.

But lets say they are incompetent as well and decided they should ship the board back for a new bios flash.
Then it might be more reasonable.
Lets say 30 min to strip a mb out and 30 min to put it back in.
So an hour out of their time.
So now lets add shipping. Lets say they use ups ground with tracking and call it 50 bucks.
So now they make 150 an hour.
Is that what pc repair shops charge now?
I believe in charging what is fair, cost plus some profit.
but sorry I can't see any shop justifying that cost for the work we are talking about.

So take it elsewhere. Always get quotes up front.

If I charge you $200 and it takes me 5 minutes does that mean I charged you $1200/hr? No, it means I charged you $200 and I don't prorate my labor by the fractional hour, and if you don't like it, go somewhere else.

OP you’re looking out for your friend, and I get that, but as someone who has owned and run a PC repair shop there are things that are universally true:

1. Customers are generally ignorant about their problems and what it will take to solve them.
2. Customers will flat-out lie to you to save face or get one over on you (hagglers).
3. Small jobs rarely stay that way.

Quoting a flat rate, regardless of what they say the issue is up front, is SOP so you don’t make your time worthless.

I wanna know what motherboard it is.... I have not seen a motherboard that you could not upgrade yourself since the early 90's

He's just talking about flashing a BIOS/UEFI, but some boards won't boot far enough with certain procs installed to finish that process.

Hmm, still no reason to send it anywhere...there is more to this story...

no that is what it was.
AMD mb only supported some lower end processor.
he only had the higher end processor, and it wouldn't even post with that plugged in.

AMD offers a free service and will do the upgrade for free if you ship it back, or they will "loan" you a low end processor so you can upgrade the bios to a newer version that will support the higher cpu.

I don't remember the mb.

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/pa-100

but you can read about it here.

ripoff repairs like this is why I got into watch modding.  My Seiko wasn't running right, Seiko wanted $168 to "repair" the movement.

I later found out that it's a 10-minute job that involves swapping out the movement, a part that costs me $45 and probably costs Seiko $20.  Yet they wanted $168 to do it.

Rent or mortgage on the shop
License and permits fees
Monthly Utilities cost
Business and employee Insurances
Employee pay and other cost responsibilities
Tools
Knowledge

I guess these things don't come into play for some people who don't think of the entire picture when costs are involved. Then again the imorons running the country, are turning too many in a free shit army.

Is it really a ripoff if you decide to do it yourself?

from your link:
and
and apparently replaced the OE mb with a different mb, because the OE would have run out of old-ass stock some time in 2020, or already flashed if it's still in production.

More like he tried to replace a gen2 cpu with a gen3 cpu, had to replace the OE board with with a non-OE mb, and you think that should take 20-30 minutes tops?  $200 for BIOS flash, installing Windows, installing drivers, and checking/fixing the hack job is reasonable.  Especially if that covers a new license since a prebuilt won't (easily) transfer to an aftermarket board.

I don't know where he bought the board from, but it literally was a bios flash to get it working again.
windows only cares if you replace like 2 or more items before it freaks out and wants to re-register.
he bought the same board by part number.
They didn't know enough to try and be sly about getting someone else to do their work. They didn't even know all it needed was a bios flash.

There are costs of doing business with everything. You simplify it into "only flashing the bios", but fail to account for diagnosing the problem, ordering the free drive, doing the work, boxing the drive up to send back (does AMD pay shipping both ways?), writing up the ticket, telling the customer what was wrong and handling the transaction, plus all the normal overhead things like reporting sales tax to the state, etc.

Additionally, when paying for a service you're not only paying for the provider's time, you're paying for their knowledge and experience. They didn't start off where they are, they gained that through years of putting in the time...