[TouchPad General] sean is here.:
How I scored 2x's 32gb Touchpads, last night...a pay by play.

I'm not trying to troll here, or get flamed for this post, but I don't see Ebay as the bad guy here...or HP.

Ebay's not bad. Neither is HP. Don't be bitter if you didn't get lucky or prepare.

Here are a few thoughts. I'm in south England and was lucky enough to get (not one, but) 2 32gb models. But I expected the sales rush and made proper preparations. I mean, the way this was publicized, even if only 1% of the US population (excluding the rest of the world, mind you) was interested then there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million people trying to get on that auction. Knowing this, like I said, I made some preparations. Maybe these steps helped, maybe I got lucky, maybe I made a deal with the devil...but the moral of the story is that I gave it thought, prepared as much as I could, and got exactly what I was hoping for...here's how it went down. [auction began 12:00AM local time]

1. (9:00PM local time) I powered down my laptop for about 2 hours, to let the processor and mb cool down (I know, probably excessive, but I really wanted a pair of pads)

2. (11:45PM local time) I turned off my wifi adaptor and connected directly to my router with an ethernet cable (my housemate offered me his 20 meter cable, but I opted for my 2 meter cable...again, probably overkill: worrying about signal reduction and loss over an additional 18 meters of ethernet cable)

3. (11:48PM local time) I manually killed any programs and processes running in the background at reboot. If I didn't need it for the browser for this auction, it was terminated. Why waste processing power on ObjectDock or WinAmp?!

4. (11:49PM local time) I deleted my cache, browser history and cleared all data in my browser and killed a few unnecessary browser extensions (again, why did I need them last night?).

5. (11:52PM local time) I logged into ebay, and opened the HP store and the touchpad stores in spare browser tabs about 10 minutes before the auction prices dipped. (This probably didn't increase my chances of being effective, but it made me feel better that I could see the auctions.)

6. (11:54PM local time) Possibly the most effective measure was copying the URL for the auction I wanted to get in on to the clipboard (I assume we all know CTRL-C, here). This was helpful when the REAL traffic hit.

I had absolutely NO problem loading the site, until 1 minute after the price change (12:01AM local time). Then all hell broke loose. I assume there were several servers in the Ebay server bays that literally almost caught on fire last night (ok, maybe a bit of literary hyperbole there). I clicked to add a (first just 1) 32gb pad to my cart. I was taken directly to the pay for my cart-page...but then I decided that my wife would probably appreciate one for her bday in a few months, so I decided to damn the torpedoes and go for broke (12:03AM local time). When I went back however, was when problems started popping up. The servers weren't returning data...basically it was an admin's worst nightmare. There would've been nothing they could do even if they had been watching it happen. Here's where #6 was handy, I popped open a new tab and with CTRL-V pasted my destination URL. Working as frantically as a xmas-elf high on meth on xmas-eve, I had to rinse and repeat this step a few times (now we're up to about 12:05-7 local). I had a strategy for reloading the page, too. I noticed before the prices dropped that the site either loaded in about 1-1.5 seconds or it took up to a minute, and had a tendency of crashing (message: no data returned from server). So after several reload/wait half a second cycles I managed to get 2 of those bad-boys in my cart, and immediately paid for them.

End of story. Sorry that got so long, but I'm long winded...

Anyway, sorry to those who didn't make the preparations or have the luck that I did. Like I said, I dunno which it was...but IMO the prep paid off.