You were the box and packing material on that move!
Ah, never thought of it that way. =)
That’s actually not a bad idea. I would have never thought of that. Going to keep that in mind.
Plus, hey, then you’ve got toilet paper right away at your new place!
There is also this stuff.
That stuff is great. Quite a few PC vendors use it to ship their PCs around.
You laugh, but that was exactly the situ… I was sitting in a blank white box of an apartment, on a mattress on the floor, a suitcase next to me, a coffee table with my desktop monitor in front of me, and now with toilet paper, what else did I need?!
It arrived today… in pieces.
My son is super bummed. I feel so bad. :(
I have only seen pictures and FaceTime images, but it doesn’t look good. One of the posts that holds the heat sink to the mother board may have snapped. The SSD drive fell out. All the plastic stuff on the front of the case is a mess.
So, I have to figure out how to recover from this and I would like your help.
It doesn’t look like we insured it, so I am not sure if we have any recourse with UPS. Likely not, so I guess it means troubleshooting and replacing broken parts. The problem is, what is the best way to go about doing this?
Here is what we have tried so far.
- Plugged it in and turned it on, but it didn’t post.
- Re-seated the power supply plug to the motherboard, but still no post.
:(
Suggestions?
- Can I take it to some place like Best Buy and get them to test the individual components, or is that a bad idea?
- Other ideas?
I am not a fan of any of the local big retailers, Best Buy, Office Depot… they just charge a lot for very little work.
I’m sorry to hear it didn’t ship well. Is there anyone in your son’s part of the world who might be willing to test the individual parts with him?
Thanks Nesrie! The Best Buy he took it too treated him pretty he good. They offered to assess it for like $100, which had me worried at first, but as soon as he took it out of the box, the guy said it was totaled and that he wouldn’t officially look at it. Nevertheless, he did check the HDD (dead) and SSD (intact) and give his impressions about the rest of the parts. CPU might be recoverable with a new fan, as well as the power supply and memory.
So we may get a new case and motherboard and start testing ourselves.
If a drive as small and light as a SSD was knocked out. And a pin holding the heat sink was also broken, all I can think is that the box was banged about a lot.In fact I’d call it an exceptional amount of force. I would call it a damaging amount of force and not what would be normal for the delivery of any package. While you might not have had it insured, I have to think that you could be compensated by your shipper just because you could call it excessive damage to a normal package.
Thanks Rich. That’s an excellent reminder. It’s just such a sucky thing to have happen, because he really worked hard to plan, save and purchase, and then build that thing. I may have to give them hell.
Give them hell, buddy.
Yeah it really sucks. I hate the shipping companies and insure everything. My strategy for packing things for them is that I need to be able to pick up the package and throw it six feet and have it fare well. Because that’s what they’re going to do, probably.
Good luck. I agree with Rich.
My understanding is that there are implied warranties for shipping as there are for purchasing products. Just because they say we have no responsibility for damage, does not mean that they actually have no responsibility for damage.
That just sucks. I shipped hundreds of computers Fedex and I can’t recall a single HD failure. Even on the machine that got pierced by a forklift the HD still worked. This was all before the days of SSDs too, so they were all spindle drives.
This is mine too. Depending on what kind of shipping I think there is supposed to be a default covered amount with say UPS specific types of shipping but it won’t cover a desktop.
Yeah getting the box knocked around hard enough so internal parts are breaking that’s definitely not what’s supposed to happen.
You know I remember when I was young scraping together just enough to get a computer together so I could continue to enjoy games, even if’s not the one that was released yesterday… so what I am getting is, if it’s okay, I’d like to contribute to replacing any broken parts or labor to get him up and running. If the CPU is okay, and he just needs a new heatsink, and the SSD is good those can be some of the more expensive pieces anyway.
Wow, you didn’t insure it? UPS charges $10.90 for $1000 of insurance.
If you didn’t declare its value, you may be able to get $100 out of them at most.
Oh, wow. That is a very kind and generous offer, Nesrie. Thank you so much. I can’t tell you how touched I was to read this, and to share your generous offer with my wife and son. They both were touched too.
In fact, I talked to my wife and we think it’s an excellent idea to solicit donations for this, especially from his extended family. I think she’s setting up a GoFundMe, but I don’t have the details right now. I will circle back around when I get them, and obviously nobody is obligated to help. I think I know where you might be coming from, Nesrie. When I was building computers, I once gave a guy on this forum a few parts because he was young and married and I remembered how hard it was to have an expensive hobby when I was in that same situation. This was a while ago and he doesn’t post here anymore, but it made me feel good to do that.
He took responsibility for that choice, but I could have given him better advice. We talked about how to pack it, but insurance didn’t even come up. He may have been thinking about my general philosophy on insurance for purchases (skip it) when he didn’t get it. I agree (especially now!) that insurance would have been a good investment for this purchase. Someone shared with me a horror story about shipping a computer that involved having purchased insurance but not getting a payout because the package hadn’t been packed by an authorized dealer. If we rebuild and do it again, I think we’ll just let those guys pack it and insure.
Yeah, the whole thread was about protecting the shipment, I guess I assumed you would insure it. My apologies for not bringing it up explicitly.