I have to get my computer from Ottawa to Minneapolis.
I don’t know how to ship it so it gets here in one piece. Are there canadian dopers going from near Ottawa to somewhere in the midwest? If I ship it, how should we do it…?
Experience welcome…
Ok DO NOT PACK IT YOURSELF!!!
Once again!
DO NOT PACKAGE IT YOURSELF!
Have the packaging Company do it, so you can insure it through them. I sent a CPU from Connecticut to Arizona via UPS, and it arrived with a huge dent in it. Yeah…a dent in the actual metal. So where ever you go in Ottawa make sure they package it in front of you…that way you will actually recieve a claim if anything happens. Do you have UPS
See, that’s what I"m afraid of. It’s a mac g4 cube and its miscellaneous bits and pieces (without the monitor, it’s way too big to ship and I can just buy one here anyway). But what’s important is the data on that cube…
It’s small compared to a pc’s CPU… But I’m terrified it will get killed on the way.
My parents would be doing the shipping. I thought about UPS, or FedEx but don’t want it to diiiiie…
How about cargo through an airline? Same problem, I guess?
Waaaaaah.
I’d call up Fedex or UPS and explain the deal to them, I’m sure they could offer advice. Perhaps your local post office would be of some assistance?
If you can, back up the data. If not, bring it to UPS or FEDEX and watch them do it. Insure it for 10% over it’s worth and you should be fine. I may have had a dent in mine, but all the info was still there. I’d probably not do the cargo route…
Hmmm…
Remeber a couple of weeks ago when this certain Ottawa doper drove the 1000 miles to Chicago…
Yeah… you are two weeks late darlin 
Come back and visit then bring it home with you
Curious Canuck: I was talking to my dad this morning when I realised this… and I did a lot of: :smack:
LOTS. Cuz we’ve been trying to figure out how to ship this for a few months.
I’M SUCH A DOOFUS!
Waaaaah!
Relax. Packing it yourself is very easy. Get a carton that is 4-6" larger in all dimensions than the computer. Get some of the bubble wrap with large bubbles, and wrap the computer with two or three layers of it. Fill the bottom of the carton you’re using to ship it with 3-4" of styrofoam packing peanuts, and set the wrapped computer down on it, centered so you have a few inches of space all around it. Fill the space around the computer with packing peanuts and cover it so that the peanuts actually overfill the carton somewhat. Close and seal the flaps with 2 or 3 passes of heavy packing tape and you’re done. Hard drive heads these days are self-parking, and it would take severe mishandling to damage the data.
I ship our office computers all over the place, at least twice a year. We just came back from Toronto and I had shipped two of our machines out there and back.
I can’t say enough for Saving Your Original Cartons & Packing Material.
If you save the stuff that your computer originally came in, the molded styroform packing, you can put it back into the box, tape it up and you have no worries.
Without the original packing materials, I have to go with the peanuts and bubble wrap method. It also works, but I worry more, just in case it does fall from a height or bounces around in the truck. So far though, no dead machines, on either end. 
Well, if the data is so important to you, you should be backing it up anyway.
Seriously. Data can go bye bye, even if you never ship the PC anywhere.