best way to ship a desktop?

I did this once when I moved from NYC to Seattle. I shipped a 386 and a large CRT. I packed the shit out of them both with newspaper and any random stuff I could find, and probably spent as much in shipping and supplies as I did on, uh, the CDROM add-on, which was a big boxy thing that sat on top of the case and attached like a printer (I could be wrong about how it attached, but it was definitely #1) a stand alone part and #2 pricey-- my brother gave it to me free, because he got a fancy new one that went into --gasp!-- a drive slot).

Anyhow, has anyone done this lately? I have to ship a home built tower PC and a flat screen monitor. I don’t really have any size details, but I’m pretty sure it’s all just standard parts.

I suppose I could just go the UPS store and have them pack it. I bet it costs a fortune. Thoughts?

Looking around, it all depends on weight and size and start and stop locations.

  • It’s going from Tuscon to Seattle.

  • I’m not sure about the exact dimensions, but it’s just the size of a normal PC, monitor, and enough space for packing material.

  • People are saying they have taken parts out and hand carried those parts to their destination, which is an option. I wonder which parts would be most susceptible to damage? It’s my son traveling and I think he has a stop to see some friends on the way home. It probably doesn’t makes sense to try this strategy. Any protection from hand carry parts is probably lost by factoring in extra time in transit on his stop.

The stores do a good job but it does cost quite a bit. They usually double box it as well.

If you are shipping it yourself one thing to do is to unmount and wrap separately components like large double slot video cards that rarely survive the trip without at least the need to reseat when it arrives.

I shipped them all the time a decade ago and rarely had problems outside of reseating components. Except that one time they put a forklift tine through both sides of a steel case.

Holy cow! That’ll leave a mark.

If you have a traditional hard-drive, HDD, you’d want to try and take that with you or maybe pack it very well. Those can be damaged just shipping from a retailer.

I also agree with the video card piece too.

I shipped a well-packed PC back from college (Boston) to home (Tennessee) about a decade back with full insurance. Someone put what looked like a boot through the thick side of the box, putting a huge dent into the case. The HDD bay wrenched off, probably from that, and banged around the inside. The PC was basically a total loss after that, and then, after fighting FedEx on the insurance claim for about 3 months, I wound not getting a single dollar out of the whole affair.

I’ll never get to move overseas, cuz the only way I’m ever moving a PC large distances again is securely strapped in behind the driver’s seat of my car, man.

With full insurance and you didn’t get paid? Ouch. We never paid for insurance but Fedex just fully reimbursed us after I sent them pictures. Then again we had a large account with them on their very profitable priority overnight envelope service.

They claimed the packaging was insufficient. I claimed not much packaging was sufficient to withstand a full-force kick that could put a massive dent in a solid steel case. They claimed they didn’t give a fuck :)

If you don’t normally do this, I would suggest that option.

Otherwise if you have any corporate IT friends around, reach out to them in an email, we -constantly- have old boxes from systems that have been shipped to us. You want a box big enough to get the PC in, but still able to immobilize it within the box. Hard styrofoam or firm foam works best for this. Air packs/popcorn can work in a pinch, but they allow shaking and whatnot at a greater level unless you really do a good job with packing. To ship a unit, I typically wrap with bubble wrap from a roll, put in in a box and immobilize it on all sides with some of the materials mentioned above. For a flat screen I excessively wrap the screen and try to place a harder object completely across it so that it can’t be damaged from a hit on the box on that side. Something like a corrugated sheet taped over the top of the screen side helps with this. Plus the bubble wrap.

You can get some packing supplies from places like office depot or a ups/mail store near you.

Thanks Skipper. I’m leaning toward the UPS store.

He built the PC and still has the box the case came in. Do you think that’s enough to protect the fully built PC, or would it be better to put the pc (inside the case box) inside of another box, with a little room for packing?

The tips on the flat screen are super helpful. I don’t think he has that box. Probably that one he should let the UPS store pack to get a result like you describe above.

The case boxes are usually pretty slim fitting to the case, and if that’s true for that one, you might want to opt for a slightly bigger box. Cases getting banged around are less of an expense than a case with everything else in it. I’d want more protection around the tower to be honest.

My dad shipped me a CRT and PC in just two boxes with styrofoam popcorn, and the boxes got here all bent out of shape. Luckily nothing was broken.

A decade ago when NCIX was good and before it went tits up recently, I bought an entire completed PC from them a province away. They shipped it inside the case box but with blocks of foam fitted inside the case to support the CPU heatsink + fan etc. It was glorious.

If you ask, they will usually help you with a box size to fit the items there.

Double box. If you have a big gaming GPU, take it out first.

Should be fine if you have UPS pack it up, but remember to put packing material inside the case to protect the innards from damage when it is inevitably handled more roughly than you’d like. I’ve shipped my fair share of PCs and something almost always comes loose in there - memory, GPU, sound card, hard drive mount, etc.

Put lots of packing material inside though and it’ll stay safe. If you want to be double careful, pull the videocard and hand carry it, since it’s probably the most valuable part. Maybe the hard drive too if it’s not too much trouble.

Yeah, double-box and stuff the actual case tightly full of newspaper.

If you have a large aftermarket CPU cooler, unmount it.

I’ve shipped a desktop twice, from Montreal-San Francisco (my mom packaged it, with toilet paper rolls between the tower and the box) along with a super heavy CRT monitor (the case had popped but stayed functional until I replaced it with an LCD)… and the second time from SF to London, packaged with foam strips. The second voyage was in a large shipping crate, so it was fairly well protected just by its environment… but in both cases I was really impressed. I think the worst of it was reseating the graphics card.

This thread reminds me of when I was a student and had to ship my computer to Australia where my university was.

I took out everything from the case. Packed them into boxes and flew with them. I left the case in Singapore. In Australia, I bought a new case and reassembled everything.