XP Home to Pro

[kato2274]

My business comes mostly from in home repair and most of the time when they call me 75% of them are near dead in the water. Are you doing onsite or in home or your business work and removing the drive from there pc to back it up or is ghost installed and run off the external drive. Never heard that to be possible is why I'm asking. I'm confused here.

I'm ghosting from a custom windows PE boot CD. the cd boots the computer to a windows XP like enviroment and I map the network drive then ghost the pc to an image file on the network.

I take stuff home 90% of the time. Gotta have high speed to get patches and stuff and a lot of the jobs I do they don't have high speed.

[Kodiak]

Would BartPe with ghost 8 work for this?

[3fingersalute]

I take stuff home 90% of the time. Gotta have high speed to get patches and stuff and a lot of the jobs I do they don't have high speed.

Exactly. That, and I tell people that if I sit in there home, they pay me by the hour for the whole time I am there, where if I take it home, they are not paying me to sit and watch drives format, OS's install, updates download, etc.

I keep a 3COM 3C905B NIC on my bench that I throw into any machine I am working on, use a simple ghost boot diskette that recognizes that NIC, and pull the image over to my "shop" computer that has the USB drive and caddy hooked to it.

[3fingersalute]

I'm ghosting from a custom windows PE boot CD. the cd boots the computer to a windows XP like enviroment and I map the network drive then ghost the pc to an image file on the network.

That sounds like something I'd like to check out..........

[slgrieb]

I prefer to bring most machines to the shop, because you can get more work done there. I usually have several jobs going at any given time, so it is better to have the computer in house so I can do several things concurrently. I encourage customers to let me take the machine by charging more per hour for on-site service and some services like virus/spyware removals I cap at 2 hours max if done in-house but charge for every second of time spent on-site.

Naturally, some things like networking problems, etc. can only be done on-site, but I think it is more profitable to get the computer into the shop unless you have a PSU replacement or some similar repair.

[Kodiak]

What I find onsite is that most will drive you nut's with questions and most refering to something you have no knowledge of like with other applications they have on there PC or a camera they have and want to make dvd movies with and such things like that. If they are a long distance out I will do it there but if there within 10 or 15 miles I will pick it up and return it. Charging more per hr sounds like a good idea. Most of the time 2 hrs is not enough since they don't call you untill they can't even boot the system. This is where I like to back up and just format. Reason for the questions on backup methods. (on site)