Residential Maintenance

A store repair counter quotes a flat fee to look, keeps the machine for a week, and hands it back reinstalled with the photos gone. This is somebody coming to the house and charging for the hours it takes.

The work is what it sounds like: a machine that has become slow, a printer that stopped talking to it, a phone that will not sync, and the backup nobody set up because nothing had gone wrong yet.

What it costs

$75 per hour Billed by the hour at the house, in the Miami area. We say what we think it will take before starting, and if it turns out not to be worth repairing we will say that too.

Who this is for

• A home computer that has become slow enough that somebody is thinking about replacing it.
• A household with years of photographs on one machine and no copy of them anywhere.
• Somebody setting up a new computer who would rather not spend a Saturday on it.
• An older relative who needs things set up so they keep working without being maintained.

Who this is not for

The machine is not worth the hours

Some are not, and we will tell you before the hours are spent rather than after. A very old machine can cost more to revive than to replace.

It is a business machine

Then Office IT Maintenance is the right service, and the rate is different because the work is: business machines carry accounts, backups and other people's data.

You want data recovered from a failed drive

That is a specialist job with specialist equipment. We can tell you whether it is worth attempting and who does it, but we do not do it ourselves.

Worth having alongside

• Residential NetworkingIf the complaint is that it is slow only on the internet, the machine may not be the problem at all.›
• Business Private CloudFor a household that has become a small business, the photographs and the invoices should stop living on one desktop.›
• Business Workstation SetupIf this is happening on several machines because somebody works from home, that is the business version of the same job.›