 | Puget Systems on FacebookJuly 1, 2009 – 4:35 pm by Perry Azevedo |
Puget Systems has been slowly joining the ranks of the Social Media circles. As of now, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In.
You’ve probably seen that old clichĂ©d scene a thousand times - some guy is putting the finishing touches on his house of cards or stack of dominos, and then someone sneezes and ruins the whole thing. We have pretty much that same feeling we get when a brand new computer gets roughed up during shipment. Even though we analyze hardware with specific concern for safe shipping, test each component for proper installation, and use specially designed packing materials, sometimes we still see a damaged computer. Your typical shipping damage might include an unseated video card, or even a dislodged processor heatsink. However, the package we just recieved back takes the cake!
Earlier this week Microsoft made public the release candidate for their next OS - Windows 7. It is available as a free download from them, which will be good until March of 2010 (with limited usability for a few months after that)… so like many other tech enthusiasts I downloaded it and gave it a spin.
I’ve always had a rocky relationship with dual GPU video cards. Our first bad experience was with the NVIDIA 7950GX2, which we found over time to suffer from higher shipping damage rates. The NVIDIA 9800GX2 was even worse. Now the NVIDIA GTX 295 is the major NVIDIA dual GPU card on the market. Are we set up for a repeat experience?
This weekend, Puget Systems updated many of our preconfigured systems to default to Windows Vista 64-bit. This is in direct response to a dramatic increase in popularity of 64-bit over the last few months. As part of my research in making this call, I took a look at our operating system sales over the last few years. I found the data interesting, so I thought I’d share that data, as well as my thoughts!
The website ResellerRatings.com has been around for a very long time, and is the de facto standard for checking out just about any online retailer in the industry. It provides a place for unbiased reviews of companies by people who have purchased in the past. However, in the last few years it has become increasingly easy to get a 9/10 score or better. Can the scores still be trusted, or has ResellerRatings.com become nothing more than a marketing platform? If so, how is that possible if the reviews cannot be affected by the companies being reviewed?
On Monday, Jason Perlow at Tech Broiler wrote about a $16,000 PC we had built, which has recently been making its way around blog headlines. He commented that “Extreme PCs” are no longer relevant, and asked his readers whether these types of PCs, along with build-your-own homebrew PCs were going extinct. It’s been interesting to read through the reader comments, and I wanted to add some perspective of my own.
This isn’t a normal thing for me to blog about, but I’ve had the desire recently to share more about Puget Systems behind the scenes: what makes us tick, what we value, and how we do things. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is something that we have been particularly strong at. I want to talk about the misconceptions about SEO that are out there, talk about why we are strong at it, and why I’m not worried about sharing these secrets to our competition!
Anyways, since there wasn’t a lot of info in the reviews regarding the details of the system, I thought I would share just a few comments on the back story and a specs list for those interested.
There has been quite a bit of talk recently about Intel Core i7 CPUs and what temperature they should be running. The Core i7 CPUs have a TDP of 130W, and run quite hot compared to the Core 2 Quad CPUs we’ve used in the past. How hot is too hot? A Google search shows that there is massive confusion and misinformation around the web. In the absense of good information, I decided to find out for myself. As an Intel Premier Provider, I talked to an Intel engineer, and am writing to tell you what I found. |
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We’ve been receiving a lot of media, blog and Twitter attention regarding the “