Yesterday (last year) I decided to be a clever boy and place my Parts Express order at exactly 00:00 and a few milliseconds so that my order would be the first P.E. order of the 20's. Got everything lined up, my cart ready, then signed in about 23:30 EDT ready to buy. Ah, the silly things we do to amuse ourselves.
But - what did I find? 4 out of 5 items in my cart were back ordered.
Arrrgh! So no winning "First Order of the 2020s" for me. Typical. I might have something in the shopping cart for weeks, but as soon as I decide to buy it, it's out of stock. How do they know?
Happy New Year.
But - what did I find? 4 out of 5 items in my cart were back ordered.
Arrrgh! So no winning "First Order of the 2020s" for me. Typical. I might have something in the shopping cart for weeks, but as soon as I decide to buy it, it's out of stock. How do they know? Happy New Year.
I had to place my Parts Express, Newegg, and ProAudioStar orders before midnight last night.
I returned home from a 15 day trip Monday evening and spent all day yesterday doing a rough estimate of Tubelab's finances. Despite the second lowest sales year in Tubelab's history, some contract RF work early in the year put Tubelab too far in the black.....I had about 3 hours to spend some money, or be prepared to pay taxes on it in a couple months.
The last two laptops that I have purchased have been junk, so no more HP or Asus products. Hopefully the MSI I ordered will work better than either of them. I have had good luck with MSI motherboards.
I have put up with my current Asus craptop for almost 5 years. Either it gets used for target practice, or I give it to the 14 year old grandkid.....the outcome is the same, it will die.
I returned home from a 15 day trip Monday evening and spent all day yesterday doing a rough estimate of Tubelab's finances. Despite the second lowest sales year in Tubelab's history, some contract RF work early in the year put Tubelab too far in the black.....I had about 3 hours to spend some money, or be prepared to pay taxes on it in a couple months.
The last two laptops that I have purchased have been junk, so no more HP or Asus products. Hopefully the MSI I ordered will work better than either of them. I have had good luck with MSI motherboards.
I have put up with my current Asus craptop for almost 5 years. Either it gets used for target practice, or I give it to the 14 year old grandkid.....the outcome is the same, it will die.
But - what did I find? 4 out of 5 items in my cart were back ordered.
Reminds me of Maplin in the early 1980's.
Had to fill out a paper order form and post it off and wait.
Then you would get back about 80% of what you ordered with the rest out of stock. It could get very frustrating waiting for out of stock items.
Well at least in the 21st century we know right way if it's out of stock. I swear it's uncanny at P.E. tho - I can leave something in my cart for months, then as soon as I'm ready to order, it's out of stock.
George, best of luck wit the new laptop.
I've worked some with the MSI machines and had a good impression of them. I used to run only Toshiba for critical work, but that's been years ago.
George, best of luck wit the new laptop.
I've worked some with the MSI machines and had a good impression of them. I used to run only Toshiba for critical work, but that's been years ago.
I write ecommerce software and its common to not update stock until the order is actually made. Guesstimating stock from carts is inaccurate.
Those silly little pleasures! Do you also enjoy watching the odometer turn the next 1000 miles?
Hey Pano, sorry the order didn't work out. I know the feeling (*sigh*).
I've abided with a much-reviled Toe-shiba laptop for a similar period. It was slow out of the box (despite being a Core i7), overheated to shutdown (despite the Rolls Royce Pegasus they installed for a cooling fan), and never failed to boot in less than 5 minutes (because of unremoveable crapware and the 100% disk use issue nothing - nothing - would fix). In 2016 Toe-shiba announced they were exiting the US consumer laptop business. Good riddance.
Back on topic, I do need to order some binding posts from Parts Express for a current speaker project, but I hate ordering more stuff than I need just to get free shipping. On the bright side it's not too difficult to hit 49 bucks; there's gotta' be something I need. Now if we could just get Mouser to do a similar deal...
I've abided with a much-reviled Toe-shiba laptop for a similar period. It was slow out of the box (despite being a Core i7), overheated to shutdown (despite the Rolls Royce Pegasus they installed for a cooling fan), and never failed to boot in less than 5 minutes (because of unremoveable crapware and the 100% disk use issue nothing - nothing - would fix). In 2016 Toe-shiba announced they were exiting the US consumer laptop business. Good riddance.
I consigned "AS$-USe" to equine excrement status in 2011. That's when bad capacitors caused three computers I built with their motherboards to croak within four months of one another. What was particularly galling was that these machines were only 18 months old at the time of the first casualty.
Back on topic, I do need to order some binding posts from Parts Express for a current speaker project, but I hate ordering more stuff than I need just to get free shipping. On the bright side it's not too difficult to hit 49 bucks; there's gotta' be something I need. Now if we could just get Mouser to do a similar deal...
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Piece Of ****, i.e. likely not worth the plastic it's made of, let alone its true cost.
Kind regards,
Drew
I had two Toshiba's both cheap Pentium based units that lasted until I got something better. My wife was using the little one when smoke started coming out of it while it still ran. I resisted the temptation to watch it burn (pre lithium) and shut it off and ripped it apart. They had a little SOT 23 doing PWM duty for the CPU fan and it fried. I simply wired the fan directly to the 5 volts on one of the USB connectors and it played on. I gave it to one of the grandkids and it was dead within a few weeks.
The bigger one is still around here somewhere. It still works but is too wimpy to run anything more than a web browser.
That sounds like the $1000 HP that I got in 2007. It was one of the DELL, APPLE, HP laptops that all used the same "faulty" Nvidia chip. Lawsuits awarded Dell and Apple customers new or reworked units. HP tried to hide the issue by doing a software recall which just turned the fan speed up full all the time and wasting about 1/3 of the battery life. The Nvidia chip in mine got so hot that the plastic on the outer skin was deforming close to the chip. HP then tried to offer the customers of their $1K HP unit a $400 ACER unit in trade for their HP, This provoked more lawsuits and in the end the judgement all went to the lawyers , and the customers got screwed. I cut a hole in the plastic over the offending chip, and stuck a big heat sink on it. It worked Ok for a couple years and then died.
I got a core-I7 ASUS for a good price in 2014, It never worked right. After putting up with it for over a year, so I decided to send it back to ASUS under the 2 year warranty. When I called to obtain authorization, they informed me that my machine only had a 1 year warranty. I still have the box it came in WITH the two year rapid replacement warranty sticker on it. I even emailed them a picture of that box. Tough Sh** you have a 12 month warranty, as stated on the bottom of the laptop itself.
Theoretically.... I ordered an oxygen sensor for my car, said it was in stock and I'd have it in a few days. A few days later I get an email saying "sorry but there was an error we don't have that item, would you like a credit or a refund". I took the refund. I then decided to buy it from an overseas seller on ebay. After about two weeks I queried why it hadn't been sent, they apologized and said they didn't have one in stock and would I like a refund. I said yes.
They refunded it in US dollars and the Australian dollar had shifted and I was about $8 out of pocket, I haven't tried getting another one yet!
Tony.
Same, our service engineers (locomotives) used to carry (and drop out of the side of moving locomotives) laptops. We always bought toshiba, they were virtually indestructible, pretty sure one of the SE's backed over his with his car and it survived. BUT. at some point we ordered a bunch of toshiba laptops and every single one of them died within the warranty period. Shortly before we had had toshiba out touting their reliability record (which we had no problem believing). That was I think the turning point, probably around 2001 I'd guess. Haven't had any experience of toshiba laptops since then. Have had Dell, Lenovo, and HP since then. Dell's business line were terrible, but their home ones have been very good. The lenovo's I've had have been ok, but had a few issues, the HP's so far have been good (just bought a new one for my Daughter for school, so hope it's going to be as good as the last one).
We used to pay around 4K for a laptop back in the early 2000's I guess people wanted cheaper, so cheaper they became, and along with it, the problems.
Tony.
Yeah, I can see that. Parts Express does seem to be able to know stock levels when you put it in your cart. When I put in 4X headphone drivers, all was good. On the 31st when I can back to buy them, there as a red X and a notice saying that only 1 was in stock - before I placed the order. Good inventory tracking from P.E., bad me for not ordering sooner.
I used to find that one of the big electronics suppliers would have different part numbers for the same item, sometimes one part number would be much cheaper (I'm talking the identical actual part just their internal part numbers different).
However I learned that when you find one you need to order it pretty quickly. I'd find that if I put it in the cart and left it for a while, by the time I wanted to finalize the order, the cheap part number would be gone, and I'd have to get the more expensive one...
Tony.
However I learned that when you find one you need to order it pretty quickly. I'd find that if I put it in the cart and left it for a while, by the time I wanted to finalize the order, the cheap part number would be gone, and I'd have to get the more expensive one...
Tony.
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