I ordered a 500GB SATA hard drive from NewEgg. It was Dead On Arrival (DOA). It was making clicking sounds and my computer wouldn't recognize it. But just to be sure I called tech support (India) to verify that it was defective.

I was at first very unhappy with the tech support since it said I had a 13 minute wait and after 15 minutes the first time I was disconnected before talking to anybody, then when I called back I was disconnected again after only 2 minutes. Finally when I called the third time I was on hold for about 20 minutes before someone answered. Someone with an Indian accent. It didn't look pretty.

But I have to say that this was probably the best experience I've had with Indian tech support. His accent wasn't too thick and we got through the troubleshooting steps without much delay and without feeling like he was reading a script. Yes, I'm sure he probably was following a script (I've worked tech support before for Dell and DirecTV--you pretty much always follow a script or you get in trouble), but it didn't seem to me like he was reading everything word for word. In other words, he either knew what he was talking about or was good at rephrasing the script into his own words. Or I guess it was just a really awesome script, but that's unlikely.

So we determined it was DOA, I got my case number, then I referred to NewEgg documentation for how to get an RMA and send it back for a working drive. I saw on the packing slip that I could do the RMA stuff online, went to the website and it said I had to pay shipping to send it back.

I was not happy about that at all!

Nevertheless, I bought the shipping label, printed it out, and shipped the hard drive off. Sometime within the next couple of days I decided to write a customer review on NewEgg for the product. I informed other customers that the drive came defective and mentioned that NewEgg was making me pay to send it back. I also found out that "TigerDirect" and "India" are in the inappropriate words filter for customer reviews. I can understand why they don't allow TigerDirect, but why "India" was a "bad word" is beyond me.

Then I found a form to send an e-mail, and the blurb talked about NewEgg's "Legendary Customer service," (all while cynically thinking, "Legendary? Yeah right!") and proceeded to write an e-mail using my "angry voice" to express my displeasure with having to pay extra to get what I paid for in working condition. I mentioned that I could have bought it from TigerDirect for less, once these extra charges had been placed on there. I got an e-mail back the next day saying sorry for the inconvenience and that the shipping costs would be refunded to my card.

That appeased me but the experience still left a sour taste in my mouth, so to speak. Their reputation had dropped a level, in my book. I still felt a mixture of "Thanks!" and "You're smurfing right you'll be refunding my money!"

I got that e-mail two days ago, on the 16th.

Today I received another e-mail from NewEgg.

Apparently someone in NewEgg Product Support had read my customer review, forwarded my information and the review to someone else who could do something about it, and asked them to correct the error of charging me for shipping. All of his own volition.

That action right there completely restores my faith in NewEgg. Even though the "problem" was already taken care of due to my own complaining, this man has fixed the real problem: removing the bad aftertaste of the experience and restoring (and improving) my faith in NewEgg.

NewEgg: I just have to say this experience was a bit rocky, but in the end I'm a very happy customer!  :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup:

Lately I've been getting into the homebrew scene with my Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS.

A strange thing I've noticed in particular with Wii Homebrew is that files and folders are often sorted by the creation date instead of alphabetically. So if I happen to copy over TyrianWii before Asteroids, then Asteroids is on the bottom.

So what I would like is an application that will just modify the creation dates and timestamp of files and folders to get them to sort alphabetically.

Required features:

1) It should handle both directories and individual files.
2) Ideally it should recurse subdirectories. Or make it very easy to navigate a file system and sort all folders & files in a certain directory.

I've heard of something for linux or possibly mac called a Poke that would change the date, but I'm not sure what it is or how it works, and I'm on Windows XP, so it's not an option for me.