Tag: NewEgg

Born to Track

Wednesday morning my tablet was loaded onto UPS Flight 2917, an MD11 freighter, headed for Dallas-Ft. Worth International. It changed planes there for Boston with a stop in Philly (UPS Flight 2020 Airbus 300)!

I ordered a tablet from NewEgg. Very excited. It should be here tomorrow. Right now I’m in UPS obsession mode! I picked the right package to track!

My hope was the package would come from NewEgg’s New Jersey warehouse. Nope. This bad boy is coming from California.

Tuesday afternoon it was pulled and readied. Later that evening it was trucked to the Ontario, CA airport.

Here’s where my obsession gets going. I looked and realized it might make a daily UPS cargo flight to Chicago. Yeah, you can look up cargo flights like passenger flights!

Wednesday morning my tablet was loaded onto UPS Flight 2917 an MD11 freighter headed for Dallas-Ft. Worth International. It changed planes there for Boston with a stop in Philly (UPS Flight 2020 Airbus 300)! My 2.8 pound payload flew cross country in 13 hours without the need for flight attendants or peanuts.

There were other flights my package could have taken. Is it given a ticket? That would make for a lot more tickets than a passenger airline would issue.

Is the route predetermined or is a package just put on the next flight that takes it closer?

From Boston my package is being trucked to Windsor Locks, then North Haven, then put on the truck that comes to my house. It will be here later this afternoon.

Routing is difficult. We’re so used to seeing GPS units do it in seconds we lose sight of the amazing math involved. There are infinite ways to get almost everywhere!

So far the UPS tracking page has 12 entries.

How did I keep busy before this was available?

Package Tracking Update

I’m sure this makes sense to someone.

The one ounce Micro SDHC card I ordered from NewEgg has moved from Rutherford, NJ to Walpole, MA. I live under 90 miles from Rutherford. I live around 125 miles from Walpole. I’m sure this makes sense to someone.

For those just tuning in I mentioned yesterday a 44&#162 stamp on an envelope with my memory chip inside would have cost less and gotten here sooner!

When Tracking Info Bites You In The Ass

This is the moral equivalent of pressing, then repressing, an elevator button! It doesn’t come faster, but there’s some small (false) satisfaction.

It has been well established I am anal retentive when it comes to tracking packages. If I order something I want it NOW! I have been known to check the whereabouts of my stuff every few hours.

This is the moral equivalent of pressing, then repressing, an elevator button! It doesn’t come faster, but there’s some small (false) satisfaction.

Wednesday I ordered a Micro SD card for my new phone from NewEgg. It was ordered late in the day. I was hoping it would be shipped immediately, but not totally surprised when it wasn’t.

In the past my experience with NewEgg has been mainly good. They’re a California company, but they have a warehouse in North Jersey and usually ship to me from there.

When my order finally did get moving NewEgg sent an email with tracking info and a complex diagram showing how their Egg Saver eliminated steps and made for a better experience.

Egg Saver shipments are picked up from our warehouse at the close of each business day by DHL Global Mail, who handles shipping from Newegg to your nearest USPS facility. USPS then delivers the package to your ship-to address with your regular mail delivery within 4-7 business days.

Since then I’ve been to the tracking sites (one for DHL and another for USPS) too many times!

My little chip&#185 was picked up from NewEgg at 5:00 PM Thursday, hit the DHL facility at 6:00 PM and was processed Friday morning at 2:15 AM.

It’s Saturday. As far as I can tell it’s still in Rutherford, NJ. My guess is it will now go to Wallingford then my local post office in Hamden. But when?

Why is it still sitting in New Jersey? if it’s not there (that’s certainly possible) why bother posting tracking info on stuff you’re not tracking? USPS seems to do that all the time.

I understand I ordered the cheapest, slowest level of service. I have no right to expect it sooner than next Friday (seven business days), but I’m still surprised it isn’t moving closer to its destination.

What kind of weird partnership is this anyway? How does DHL help? If NewEgg had put a 44&#162 stamp on an envelope and sent it out with the rest of the mail I’d already have it! The USPS estimate delivery time for First Class mail to two to three days.

I wouldn’t have the tracking data to get me upset. Instead I’d have the chip!

&#185 – The package weighs .0664 pounds, aka 1 oz.

Reinstalling Windows XP

Everything went fine until Windows discovered my hard drive. Instead of 620 Gb it was reporting 131069 Mb. As I’d later find out the original XP disk only supports drives that big.

A few nights ago the main hard drive on my main desktop machine started making loud knocking sounds. Uh oh. Not good. Dead! Luckily I had recentlly backed up my photos, the only things I really needed. This seemed like a good time to reinstall XP and get a fresh start.

Maybe you are organized. Not me. My PC is as sloppy as my office–and that’s pretty darned sloppy. Starting from scratch is a convenient way to throw out a lot of crap.

I went online and found a 620 Gb hard drive. I was really tempted to get a 1 Tb, but the 620 Gb was on sale for a good price and had excellent reviews on the Newegg site. I find Newegg’s buyer reviews believable because I’ve seen so many that knock the product!

the drive itself was under $80 with free 3-day shipping. I ordered Thursday afternoon. UPS delivered it Friday afternoon. Sweet.

This machine was hand built by me and over time had accumulated 5-hard drives. I opened the case and pulled them out. Then I pulled out my original XP CDROM for the install. I’d like a dollar for every time I’ve installed Windows.

This was about the time my mechanical reconfiguration noise woke Helaine. That’s not good.

Everything went fine until Windows discovered my hard drive. Instead of 620 Gb it was reporting 131069 Mb. As I’d later find out the original XP disk only supports drives that big. Back when XP came out no one had dreamed of throwing terrabytes of memory in a desktop machine.

I ended up at Paul Thurrott’s amazing SuperSite for Windows.where I was walked through the process of ‘slipsteaming’ Service Pack 2 into my original disk. Well, almost. The current version is Service Pack 3 and my CDROM burning software doesn’t actually support what needs to be done. A few ad libs and I was on my way.

At the moment Windows XP SP3 is installing with the full hard drive recognized. It’s going along very smoothly! I’m sure something will come up to slow me down.

In the meantime, I have discovered one hard drive is a lot quieter than five.

My Favorite Ad

There’s an ad running in a number of computing magazine from NewEgg, a mailorder retailer. Not only is it targeting me – it is me!

This ads salutes anyone whose ever rebuilt his computer until it didn’t work!