The Harrowing Tale of Building my New PC or: How I Learned to Love the Newegg Part 1

The tale begins several weeks ago when I ordered the pieces to build my ultimate PC. This thing was going to be a monster, 2x HD 5970's, an i7 930, and 3x 1920x1080 Dell Professional 22" monitors in an Eyefinity configuration.

I ordered everything but the monitors from Newegg.com, which doesn't carry Dell. I decided to purchase the monitors directly from Dell's website. The first clue that this wasn't going to go as planned was after I ordered from Dell, they had a 'build time' in addition to processing, shipping, etc. Turns out they weren't kidding about this build time, 3 weeks after I ordered from them, the monitors were still being built. If I would have ordered from anywhere (not the case as I would find out) else I would have those monitors on my porch in a week. Not only were they being "built", they had no estimated ship date and no other information on their order page, so as far as I could tell they took my money and had no intention of shipping those monitors any time soon.

Nearly 4 weeks after the initial order, they finally updated the order status page to say they would be shipping in 3 weeks with a shipping time of 1 week. Thats 2 months to get a couple monitors shipped to my house. So I called Dell, told them that was unacceptable and canceled my order. I planned on either buying comparable products from Newegg or buying those monitors from some other retailer.

I managed to find the exact same monitors for sale at Buy.com. I quickly ordered them Friday night and hoped to have them plugged in next Friday night. Well Monday came and went, and their status page showed they were still processing. As I left work at 5pm Tuesday I checked the status page and they still had not shipped. If I had more time I probably would have canceled the order and crawled back to Newegg to get some Samsung's. But I get home and there is a voicemail from Buy.com requesting that I call and confirm my shipping address. Peeved, I call the number and of course I get the person's voicemail so I left a message hung up. Why do they even ask for the damn shipping address online if they are just going to call and ask for it again? Wednesday comes and goes, and still the order has not shipped. I wait for my lunch break on Thursday and call the guy back just itching for a fight, but thankfully the order had finally shipped.

You would think that if Buy.com wanted to get a loyal Newegg customer on their side they would try to make the purchase as painless as possible. Instead, an online retailer decides to call to confirm an address. They only made me type my address twice, and its on file with the credit card, I can't understand the reason they had to call other than to delay the order and to make sure I never use them again for my online purchases. If it were Newegg, those monitors would have been there Thursday at the latest, instead they weren't even shipped until Thursday.

This concludes Part 1, stay tuned for Part 2 where I reveal stunning new developments! (such as how I screwed up my motherboards for 2 weeks)