Bad Delivery Service Destroying Amazon Credibility

I recently ordered a badminton racket for my son from Amazon UK. Delivery time was suggested to take around 4 working days.

I received an email telling me the item had been dispatched 3 days later - so far so good.

After a further 5 days had passed I decided to contact Amazon to find out what had happened. Finding a phone number for Amazon UK wasn't easy but for those who are interested, the Amazon UK Free Phone number is 0800 279 6620. Press option "8" for a human!

The human in question kept telling me not to worry and the item would be with me in another 7 days time.

I pointed out in an increasingly frustrated tone that I was already worried because I know of no delivery service within the UK that spends 12 days driving around looking for a particular address!

I demanded to have the tracking number and details to investigate myself and eventually found out what is going on.

Apparently, the item is passed to the Amazon contracted courier, in this case TNT. They then spend 3 days "processing" it and then take a business decision whether they are prepared to actually deliver it or not.

If they decide not to deliver the package they will then arrange to have it passed onto the Royal Mail which from their point of view is "dispatched". In actual fact it took another 2 days to get to the Royal Mail.

Royal Mail then schedule this as a standard parcel delivery which they state takes 3 to 5 days from posting.

The conclusion of all this lark is a ridiculous wait for your product and no customer support to speak of. Short term gain for Amazon profits, long term loss of reputation.

Whole Of The Moon

...I was listening to a CD of Celtic Songs the other day called Best Of Celtic Woman and was suddenly struck by one particular track called "Whole Of The Moon" sung by a relatively unknown artist called Rachel Earwicker.

The song was previously released by The Waterboys but this was her own version of that track. Its a lovely version and she has a great voice and it makes you wonder how many artists there are out there with stacks of talent but have never had that lucky break.

Anyway, if you like, have a listen and let me know if you think its nice, or if I am starting to slowly go off my rocker and perhaps should be put out to graze...

The link is above, then click on the Listen To Sample Icon. The clip loads fast but is low quality.

Download hangs on local http server

..I have been to hell and back over the last week trying to solve a stupid problem on my windows XP Pro machine.

It started when I noticed my IE7 freezing when I tried to access my own website on my own local web server over http. It was random but got a lot worse the larger the page or file size. I decided to set up a 10Mb file test and try downloading this from my web server to my local PC but this was impossible to complete without freezing up.

At first I couldn’t understand this effect because downloading 100Mb over the internet from a remote website on the same PC worked perfectly. First impression was to blame the web server, but this could not have been responsible because I have 8 other PCs and laptops that were perfectly able to download the same 10Mb test file without any problem.

I eventually solved the problem, but on the journey, learned some useful information especially from a great helpful guy called Bob Konigsberg with whom I made contact through the ITKnowledgeExchange website.

I have documented the facts here and hope that you might also find the steps interesting, so I will list the steps I took and the final result...

THE PROBLEM DEFINED

If I try to download a big file or serve a largish page locally from my web server to my development PC over HTTP using any browser I am experiencing a random freeze.

Example:-
I try to download a 5Mb zip or mp3 file via HTTP from my server to my problem desktop PC.
I enter the http address in the browser, I am then offered the open or save window...
I select save, the download reaches anything from 5% to 30% complete but then freezes and sits there forever "downloading".

This can happen on any file type including html files, but if the file size is small then it isn’t noticeable as all works OK 95% of the time. Occasionally, I get a blank page served, but if I make a refresh then the page normally renders OK.

Now what makes this weird are the following facts

1 - I am running two servers live and test. The problem is the same on either server
2 - I have 8 other PCs here that do NOT have the same problem accessing the servers.
3 - If On the problem PC I access the same file by simply copying via windows explorer over the network there is no problem.
4 - I have ruled out any hardware problem by swapping the complete HDD into another identical machine but this still fails.
5 - The problem machine has NO trouble accessing any other www servers with HTTP over the internet, only my local servers with http.
6 - I have tried with multiple Browsers with same result.
7 - Compared IE advanced settings and add ons line for line with the 3 month old working version.
8 - Set up a new administrator user on the problem PC but still same problem
9 - As I have 2 domains, I joined the other domain with the problem PC but same problem
- I have run Adaware, AVG reports nothing and I have run registry checks


So in conclusion the problem occurs due to some relationship with http access between my one Problem PC and 2 local servers. Those same servers are currently successfully serving pages to the internet without problems.
I have an old backup copy of my HDD from around 3 months ago and this does NOT have the problem, so whatever has caused this has occurred in the last 3 months. I have uninstalled any software products during this time, but it hasn’t helped.

My own personal theory at this stage is that the problem appears to be related to throughput errors. The bigger the download, the more likely the http protocol locks up. It is as though some parameters have been changed to affect the buffering or something in that area of which I know nothing...

Steps Taken to Analyse and Solve this Niggling Problem

STEP 1
Test to see if this problem is IE7 related or whether it is the same using Firefox.
- Result is that it is not Browser Dependent

STEP 2
Compare the Network settings against the 3 month old copy for these protocols
Client For Microsoft Networks
File and Printer Sharing For Microsoft Networks
QoS Packet Scheduler
Internet Protocol(TCP/IP)

- Result is that all the settings are all 100% the same on both machines. This is not surprising as the Old Working OK version was in fact a clone of the Problem PC made approx 3 Months ago.

STEP 3
Download a copy of the free open source analysis tool called Ethereal and this captures a whole lot of information that is happening at the time the download is happening.

- Result is The Ethereal traces showed the PC was producing packets with an incorrect TCP checksum which would indicate faulty hardware i.e. time to swap out the Ethernet card for a new one and un-install and re-install new network card drivers.

- Unfortunately the result is exactly the same with the different Ethernet card fitted. I am not surprised at this, because one of the tests I did earlier to rule out any hardware failure was to remove the HDD of the problem PC and insert it into another physically identical PC connected to a different network cable and this still displayed the problem.

- I have to conclude that the problem is system software related but I have also ruled out browser dependency...


STEP 4
Run a Disk Check on all Data Sectors
- Result is no errors found

STEP 5
Now Uninstall ALL TCP/IP related network components and re-install

…now this one is a bit tricky. There seems to be no official way to uninstall TCP/IP in Windows XP Pro so I had to complete the following steps: -

1 – Display Properties of the LAN
2 – Highlight Client for Microsoft Network and click Uninstall
3 - Highlight File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks and click Uninstall
4 – Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) cannot be uninstalled, so I followed an unofficial procedure as follows:-

* Boot into Safe mode with networking
* Delete keys Winsock and Winsock2 from the registry
* Edit the nettcpip.inf in c:\Windows/inf file and set the MS_TCPIP.PrimaryInstall Characteristics value from 0xA0 to 0x80
* Open the LAN properties, click on Install, click on have disk, point to the windows/inf directory and Now its possible to uninstall the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
* Restart the system into normal mode
* Edit properties of LAN again and then install the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
* Reboot Finally for the Last Time

- I also uninstalled IE7, downloaded a fresh copy from Microsoft and Re-installed that.

Result - Bad news is that the same fault persists!


STEP 6
Now time to visit www.sysinternals.com and download the following two free Microsoft tools that offer more detailed analysis of processes going on at the same time.

The first tool is called "TCPView" and gives a lovely indication of network traffic in real time as it happens.

The second tool is called "Process Monitor" and this gives out a huge volume of information for every process that is doing something again in real time. This tool needs a bit of "tuning" to remove unnecessary messages. This is easily achieved by using its rich set of filters e.g. you can right click on any particular process like "iexplorer" and select "include" to display only Internet Explorers activity.

- Result of this allowed me to see the "WriteFile" activity during the download. Now this could be very useful in some situations, but in this case it did not lead me to the answer.
- However, one interesting effect was that while the Process Monitor was running, that in itself improved my problem so that I could download up to 10Mb. Although as soon as I made the file larger (400Mb) I had the same problem again. This was a weird effect but obviously no solution.

STEP 7 - THE SOLUTION
Suddenly thought of trying to restart my machine in Safe Mode with Networking and see if the problem was still there.

- Result was that in Safe Mode the problem disappeared and the downloads worked perfectly.
- This meant it was likely to be a software driver of an application causing the problem. I therefore carried out the following: -

- 1) Create a "GHOST" Disk to Disk Copy of my HDD so I can play around with no risk.
- 2) Restart back into normal mode.
- 3) Go to Add/Remove Programs.
- 4) Work through each program and uninstall every possible candidate making a restart after every 3 uninstalls. Immediately retry the download.

- Using this method I eventually found the troublemaker and cured my PC!!

The culprit? Well this turned out to be Zonealarm version 7.0.362.000 and I wish to God I had started that search in reverse alphabetical order!

So I installed al older version of Zonealarm and that gives no problems. Just to double check, I re-installed version 7.0.362.000 again afterwards and the problem was instantly back.

So Check Point, given the right circumstances your latest version has a bug in it!


Phew!