Extra Job...Sort of

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Every once in a while I have to go to meetings regarding the performance fo the software and Workstation/servers I work on at my job.

One of the guys who comes from the company who provides this stuff has a sideline in building PCs and doing Virus removal and upgrades.

He has offered me part time work doing this with him on a if and when basis which I have accepted.

Although it is part time I felt this would be good experience under my belt.

I am getting a delivery of parts on Saturday and he wants me to build 6 PCs by Dec 14th.

The pay isn't great £50 per build and £20-£30 for an virus removal but it's experience.

 

I hope he'll give me a reference. Not sure on tax since I think he is gonna pay m,e cash in hand

 

Are you able to put the job on your CV? atleast that will boost your CV, plus you gain experience doing that and some extra mooonnnnnneeyyyyyy. Way to go bra.

 

I actually enjoy building PCs (most of the time) so £50 per PC isn't bad at all. After all, how long will it take? Less than an hour to actually build it, then leave it running some kind of burn in test. £50 an hour sounds pretty good to me.

 

The onus will be on you to declare the earnings as self-employed on your tax return

As to the pay - sounds about right to me. I used to buy in ASUS barebones plus components from Landmarq and build for customers but then Landmarq started their own build offer which worked out (trade) at about £24 a unit so it wasn't worth me spending the time to build. I did, however, always load the o/s myself - you get a "feel" for if an install isn't going right, especialliy sticking to the same builds each time.

 

One of the bulds is a raid build, never done that before

 

Hardware or software RAID ?

 

4 hard drives I think

 

Yeah - but with a RAID card or without?

 

oh yeah with a card

 

Card or not (some m/b support raid 1/0onboard now) you should have a choice of hardware or software.

Personally I prefer hardware RAID.

What's the o/s going on it ?

 

Happy days, extra money this time of year, gotta be a good thing!

 

Win XP pro 64bit if I remember correctly I haven't got the spec sheet in front of me.

 

yep, will get me saving money

 

Hmmn, depending on what sort of apps are going to run on it I'd probably go for a RAID-0 stripe set across one pair of disks and then mirror this to the other pair. That way if a disk from either pair goes down you should be able to switch the boot to the other pair from the RAID card and instigate the repair of the damaged drive in whichever stripe set.

If you need to brush up on RAID there's plenty on the 'net of course. This guide isn't too bad.

 

cheers I'll print that of when I get home

 

Hardware RAID?

Easy nothing to it , you wont even have to look at the manual there self explanatory via onboard bios setup these days.

 

Agreed software RAID is pants. one reason i hated apples xservers.

Only problem with some Hardware RAID is that RAID sets will only work with the same model of controller, so backup and/or keep spare controller

My desktop is RAID 0 purely for performance.

 

Yes, setting up RAID on a hardware controller is very straight forward in most cases. Actually installing an OS onto the array isn't always easy and in some cases it can be very problematical.

Last year I built a specialist video editing system for a customer and used Raid 1 for the two main drives. Was all very straight forward and no problems at any stage.

Not long before that I had setup a specialist music recording PC. (just the two linked sound cards cost a touch less than a grand). Part of the spec was two WD Raptors set up in striped mode (Raid 0) for when recording audio as the amount of data being stored was very high and needed very fast drives to keep up. Again, the hardware side of setting up the array was easy, but getting XP to recognise the array was a total nightmare and took ages to sort out. Cracked it in the end, but it was a painful process.

Not sure if the 64bit edition of XP could cause extra problems there GBL. It's not exactly known for it's wide range of compatible drivers, anything but.

If you can get away with it, 64bit Vista is a lot easier to live with in that regard.