Rootkits

[suityou01]

May I ask, how much did you charge local customer for this?

I find these sorts of jobs very time-consuming, so charging even £25 per hour can make for a hefty bill.

Only an hour. Not really fair to ask the customer to pay for the time I spent fixing my equipment (monitor blew up, PC died etc etc. Had a day of it. Also this virus had me stumped so spent quite a bit of time googling.

The thinking is this. By attracting this sort of work I am making connections locally and picking up bigger jobs (this is actually working, I picked up a big server upgrade job after doing a good job for someone removing a virus)

Also, it does keep you current. Imagine if I was called out to de-ming a server riddled with viruses, experience counts.

Major loss on this job financially speaking, but knowledge gained and also a feeling of job satisfaction. Also the chap was well chuffed, understood it had been a sod and said there may well be further jobs in the pipeline from other family and friends (I beleive this, I try and see the good in people)

Other jobs go smoothly and what is billed as an hour can sometimes be done in 20 minutes, if things go your way. Comme si comme ca. It's when you stop trying you have real problems.

[Platypus]

Thanks for the insight

I'll often turn jobs like this down these days, as everyone knows a geeky teenager nearby who'll offer to do it for a tenner, so when I say it's likely to cost (even a modest) £50 these sort customers tend to turn green and go elsewhere. If they don't, and the job turns into a nightmare, then I could end up spending a hell of a lot of time for practically zilch return.

It was a batch of 'black screen of death' (vista boot), blue screen on boot and boot-loop jobs that put me off

I rarely found the 'charge an hour, spend 20 minutes' jobs!

Anyway, I'm glad this model is working for you.

[Advocate]

To be honest in an enterprise environment, if a server is riddled with malware; I'd recommend it was decommissioned and restarted from scratch. Especially if rootkits are suspected...

[suityou01]

To be honest in an enterprise environment, if a server is riddled with malware; I'd recommend it was decommissioned and restarted from scratch. Especially if rootkits are suspected...

Agreed. Or a temporary server could be built quickly to take the strain while a "proper" job was done.
Another model is this ...

Viruses mmmm, ok well I can spend 2 hours removing them @ £60 or reinstall the OS for £30