Long and Winding Road to Windows 7

Today I received a box containing the replacement PC for my wife. I got a really great deal on a refurbished HP Desktop with a quad core AMD processor, 8Gb of memory and a 750Gb drive from TigerDirect.com.

I’d been waiting about a week for it to get here, and my poor wife has been limping along on my slowly dying laptop in the meantime. I suspect that it’s about to die, as it has become painful just to start up a browser or read email.

The UPS lady arrived at my door shortly before 5pm, and told me that she had heard a crash from the back of the truck in the morning. At first she thought someone had been drinking in the truck: she smelled beer.

As it turned out, a box containing beer had fallen and was leaking in the truck. She showed me the bottom of my package was wet, and said I could refuse the shipment and have her take it back.

I figured that it would probably be OK, since they usually pack things like desktops pretty well (in plastic and foam), so I asked her if I’d be able to send it back after looking inside. She told me that she could come by tomorrow and pick it up and gave me her supervisor’s number.

I opened the box and found that there didn’t appear to be any dampness or liquid inside (so far so good). But then when I actually pulled the desktop out, the front panels were all poked out, and the Styrofoam pieces were broken.

Now I figured that it would be just my luck that it would work initially and then start having weird problems caused by having been dropped. So I decided to send it back, and I called the number the UPS lady had given me.

Her supervisor told me I had to call the shipper and have them make a claim, that they couldn’t return the box once it had been opened. So I called TigerDirect to get a return label and see if they could ship a replacement.

The return part was easy, they sent a link to my email. Interestingly enough though, during the order process, they had offered me a $5 discount for using Google Checkout, and that meant they couldn’t just ship a replacement out. The customer service rep told me they could process a new order and give me free next-day shipping, but it would require a new order.

After looking at the inventory, the machine I had ordered was the last one of that model, and they offered me something that looked similar in price. I looked at the things that were available and decided to wait, so I’m back on the hunt for my replacement desktop.

Maybe somebody is trying to tell me something, this hunt for a new computer has been painful, maybe I should just look for another Mac …