Online shopping can be hazardous for anyone, even me.  Recently my motherboard decided to give out on me…followed by my father’s.  Upon buying a replacement for mine online, I waited patently for it to arrive.  When it did, I installed it, and lo-and-behold, it was highly unstable.  Upon testing the CPU, Memory, and other parts in another known working computer, I found that the motherboard I just purchased was totally FUBAR.  This happens to a lot to people that shop online.  There are many advantages to shopping online.  There is the wider selection of items that any store in the world carries in store.  If you’re looking for it, I’m willing to bet that someone out there is selling it, be it on eBay.com or a small component business that just went online.  Price is another advantage to shopping online.  At www.ccraft.net, a Florida Chain Store that specialized in Computer Component and online stores, they are currently selling 128MB sticks of PC100 8ns SDRAM for a little under $60, plus $9.96 for shipping, which is a very nice price anywhere.  The matter of shipping brings the first disadvantage to online shopping.  Some way or another, via a high price and free shipping, or a normal price and a shipping fee, you will be paying for the shipping.  For small items, like Memory and CPUs, it’s not big deal, but for the big items like monitors and cases, it can get down right insane.  I ordered my RAM from CCraft on 10/13, and UPS says it will arrive on 10/24, about a week and a half from when I purchased it.  Returning the item is another problem in itself.  The company I bought the first non-functional motherboard from charges a 7% restocking fee, along with shipping both ways, and the original sales tax.  That puts me out over $20 on a $100 motherboard.  Not very good if you’re trying to keep the customer happy, which this one isn’t.

No matter what you do, BE CAREFUL when shopping online.  Read the companies policies and make sure you can get your money back (minus shipping) if the product is faulty.

Search Engines
Search engines have come a long way from years ago.  Now, the most popular of the search engines, www.yahoo.com, offers a large listing hand picked web sites that are sorted by real humans, along with the usual machine found websites.  A lot of people including me like a wide search over a wide scope of websites, because what you’re searching for is very hard to find, such as part numbers for obscure parts.  The best search engine I have found for this is www.google.com.  They constantly index websites which yields many finds for what you’re looking for.  I’ve NEVER had under 8 hits on any search word, including the part number for a 486 laptop battery.

Google, like all other search engines, support all the special syntax, such as quotation marks for grouping items, the keywords and, or, not, and the + and – symbols representing and and not.  I used to use AltaVista, but now I use Goggle for it’s massive website database.  If you’re tired of all those silly search engines, try google.