My wallet is bleeding.


So the scumsuckers over at Buy.com claimed to have E6600 processors in stock, so I bought one a while ago (I posted about it, I think). Turns out they're a load of lying bastards and did not, in fact, stock the processor. I knew it was too good to be true, especially with all the reputable sites listing out-of-stock at that point. Oh well.

So finally Newegg got them in stock, and dropped their obscene markup so that the price was competitive with street prices from other sites. I like Newegg, so I decided to cancel the (still not shipping) Buy.com order.

Get this - half of the order-confirmation emails from them talk about this other site, Shop.com. So I figured they were just the same site. Turns out they're not. Now, here's the crappy thing: Shop.com has my user account with its password... but no record of any orders from me. Buy.com doesn't have my user account on file.

So I'm thinking I may have to break down, dust off my phone, and talk to the dismally mindless fringe filth that usually populates tech support hotlines for online shopping sites. Fortunately, just before I resigned myself to that most excruciating of fates, I found an interesting link on Buy.com - Order Lookup.


Turns out you can look up full order details, including billing and shipping address information, with only the order number and a couple of trivial pieces of information. You know, the kind of information they send in fricken plaintext to you in the invoice email.

In other words, they're a massive security hole just waiting for fraud to happen. So I'm never buying from those assholes again.



On the bright side, I got my CPU from Newegg. Unfortunately, in a moment of weakness, I got an E6400 instead of the E6600 (the difference is 1MB of cache and a slight clock speed boost). Normally I wouldn't worry about this, but I'd sworn to myself I'd get the E6600 "no matter what" since it's the sweet-spot of the price/performance curve. (Naturally, this also means it's bloody hard to find in stock.)

So now I have an E6400 due in tomorrow, and an E6600 due in next week... along with my impulse-buy Athlon64 3800 upgrade for my gaming rig (up from the 3200 that's in it now).


Now, I was committed to spending that money, so it's not like I really care. I have a solid hardware budget that I've been saving for quite some time, so I won't have to trade food for sexy Conroe goodness. But the real bastard of the matter is this: between the E6400 and the 3800 upgrade, I've just cleared out $500.

And $500 just happens to be the budget I had set for getting a 360.


This leaves me with a nasty conundrum: return the two extra CPUs and get the 360, or keep the CPUs (you never know when you might want an extra CPU!) and wait until after Christmas for the 360 in hopes that the price will drop?

Door Number Two is looking like the winner here, since I'm probably going to be far too lazy to repack the CPUs and mail them back for the refund (especially since I'll get slammed with a restocking fee). I also can't pass up the opportunity to get discounted console hardware; considering I didn't buy an Xbox until almost three years into the product lifecycle, I think waiting a few months for a 360 will be fine.


So now all I have to do is endure the seductive siren call of Dead Rising that haunts my dreams...