Brennan’s Blog

I have been using 2 external drive enclosures with 350GB drives but as I add more movies and music and virtual PC images to the drive they have gotten pretty full. Today I ordered a 500GB drive and I was going to order it from CDW but I ran into some trouble. Since I moved this past year it still had my old address associated with my account. I thought that was OK since most sites give you a way to specify a more current address during checkout. That was not the case. I dug around and found the "address change request" form which allows me to request the change, with some sort of delay. It seems there is no way for me to pop in and make an order and be on my way with CDW. So I looked elsewhere.

Another really great site for ordering electronics is TigerDirect. They carry the exact same products but what I noticed right away was the price of the hard drive was $10 lower. It is like that for most products compared to CDW. The one I wanted was the Maxtor Pro 500 and it comes in at $149. The exact same drive on CDW is $159. I did see that the CDW shipping costs were a little lower than TigerDirect, but even when I selected the $7 shipping cost it was still cheaper than the original price of $159.

And as I have been watching the prices of large LCD screens drop I have noticed that TigerDirect has had the most amazing low prices. Some of their names brands are somewhat unknowns but a friend of mine bought the Olevia 37" and says it looks great. He bought it last fall for what I thought was over $1000 at the time but it is now $800 and dropping. And as all of the new WiFi enabled home theater products came out last week (see wireless HDMI) the prices of these "outdated" wired screens will drop even more rapidly. Come March I hope to have my order in with TigerDirect for a new LCD and do not plan to return to CDW.

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