When you're ordering your computer to be shipped across the country, something that should be carefully considered is shipping safety. Especially when going long distances, the bumps and jolts of shipping can be quite destructive! For a while now, we've recommended that people on the East Coast purchase their computer with at least Fed-Ex Express shipping. Not only is delivery faster (less time exposure to bumps/jolts), but shipping via air is simply smoother and safer for your new computer than rail or truck.

In an effort to provide the safest shipping possible, we have always used the best quality packing materials. However, with all the different sizes of computer we sell, a single solution is often difficult to implement. As a result, we've recently developed dedicated shipping solutions for our most popular cases. Since every computer is different, and we offer literally dozens of different case options, choosing only four was certainly challenging!

Since custom packing materials are quite expensive, we cannot make one for every case we sell, unfortunately. We've started by having custom boxes made for our top selling cases. As shown in the pictures to the left, our previous shipping boxes (left) are double-walled heavy cardboard boxes, while our new custom boxes (right) are Triple-Walled!

The real gem of this project was developing a better packing solution than the packing peanuts we'd been using. The peanuts have done a great job, but they weren't the long-term solution we were really after. Although they provide great padding, they tend to settle over along shipment trip, and might not provide the buffer we want by the time it gets to the east coast. At the same time, it's also a great big mess for the customer to unpack!

Below, you can see the difference between two ready-to-ship computers. The older shipping method is on the left, and the new foam corners solutions is the picture on the right:

When we went about selecting the cases that we were going to develop special packaging for, we kept three things in mind: Price, Quality, and Popularity. We didn't want to restrict customers options, based on the size of their budget. We're a custom computer builder after all! So we wanted to select cases that encompassed the spectrum of our price and feature range.

• The Lian-Li PC7H+: used for many of our air cooled systems.
• The Antec P180: used in many of our quiet computers.
• The Silverstone TJ07: used in our custom liquid cooled solution.
• The Silverstone TJ08: a great MicroATX tower which is also used in our Certified Home/Office Workstation.
• The Antec NSK4400: a budget mid-tower case with an included power supply.

While we chose cases that have been very popular with our customers, we also wanted cases that were high quality, and that we're comfortable recommending to any user. All of these cases feature 120mm fans for example (half as large as the standard 80mm fan), which lets the fans to move plenty of air while spinning slower than the 80mm counterparts. This essentially means that all four of these cases will be quieter than your typical computer case.

All of these cases are well engineered, and have airflow enough to cool even high-performance SLI computers. All four have easy-to-reach USB ports on the front, and good quality construction (none of that flimsy aluminum rattle, that plagues some cheaper cases). Most importantly, they've all got smart internal construction, hearty enough to take the rigors of a shipment across the country.

We're excited to offer this shipping solution! Nothing is more frustrating than having a brand new computer arrive with a huge dent in the side, because of being poorly handled by a shipping courier. This new setup gives us the flexibility to continue to offer you choices in the configuring your computer, but with the added peace of mind and customer care that Puget Computers has aimed to deliver since day one.