Free .vs. paid - was: Looking for some Zenith Z100 software

Just a quick follow-up on the issue of "free" versus "paid".

One very good reason for charging a modest amount for
your services has nothing at all to do with the money ...

It is simply that it will dramatically reduce the amount
of work you are "expected" to do. And by controlling
the price, you can control the amount of work you are
being asked to perform.

As a case in point - I maintain my "old computers" site
as a free service. I have several reasons for doing this,
however because I offer this content for free, more and
more people are assuming that I am providing a free
old computer consulting service.

Every day, I receive several - sometimes dozens of
requests for help with an old computer in my mailbox.
Some recent examples:

- Can you take a photo of the AtariST floppy drive in the
main unit (ie: please disassemble an ST, take photos
and reassemble it - at least an hour of work).

- Can you make some boot floppies for me (as all of
my equipment is maintained in storage, this would
also be an hour or more of work).

- How much is my Apple II clone worth?

- Can you help me find these chips?

- How can I put a larger hardrive in this old laptop?

- Where can I find a BIOS upgrade for this old laptop?

- What kind of processor is in this old laptop - What is
the latest version of windows that I can run on it?


And my favorite of the week:

- I haven't bothered to read the manuals you have
posted on your site, can you tell me if they contain
the answers to these questions.
(Yes, he actually stated "I haven't read the manuals")


And - on an ongoing basis, I am called upon to "read
the ImageDisk manuals" to people who find it easier
to email me than to read the documents or use the online
help, and also to explain over and over again to people
why their PC can't seem to read hard-sectored disks, or
write single-density formats.


By themselves, most of these questions wouldn't be a
big deal, but once you begin answering several to many
of them a day, the time spent begins to add-up, and before
you know it, you are spending an hour or more a day on
"free consulting" - this is on top of the effort I spend on
building and maintaining the site and it's content.

If this keeps up, you may see a statement on my "contact me"
page that I am charging for email consultation ... I don't want to
discourage the people who really my help from contacting me
but I simply can't provide support for old PC laptops,
"documentation reading" and "google search" services for
people who could just as easily do this themselves.

Dave

--
dave06a@ Collector of classic pre-PC computer systems.
dunfield. If you have an old 8/16 bit non-PC system in need of a good
com home, please contact me at email address on the left, or
via contact link of this web site:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

.

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