How laptop delivery works

WARNING: The content of this section is considered DEPRECATED and OBSOLETE It is preserved for historical or documenting reasons. For a list of reasons why your G1G1 laptop may not have arrived yet, see How laptop delivery breaks. G1G1 Fulfillment Information contains instructions on what to do if your laptop has not arrived yet. This page is NOT necessarily finished, coherent, or accurate (hence the Big Blue Draft Box below). Support-gang volunteers are working to keep it up to date, clean it up, and verify everything for accuracy, but this MAY NOT be 100% settled. Just to let you know. NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... Please leave suggestions on the talk page. Orders come in from three sources: Credit cards, PayPal orders, phone orders; via two companies: PayPal and Patriot. All orders go through some manipulation and get consolidated at the Patriot database. Patriot has the list of orders, shipping/billing addresses, emails (whenever possible). Then the data goes through a second level of manipulation as they are sent to the Brightstar database. Brightstar gets laptops from our manufacturing partner, Quanta (Taiwan). They have to open them, upgrade them, basic test (which includes using the keyboard and mouse and ensuring the correct version is on the laptop), repackage them, print labels from the data, and ship them. The "ship them" part is physically handled by FedEx or USPS, which delivers the laptops from Brightstar to your doorstep. If the laptop is returned as unable to deliver or RMA (replacement request) it goes to Brightstar. Brightstar doesn't have email addresses or the ability to send out messages to donor base. Notifications about shipping have to go back to Patriot to get sent out to donors.