The term ‘netbook’ is relatively recent, and used to describe a subclass of notebooks.  They’re designed to be small, inexpensive and efficient, perfect for general web use, but not for heavy lifting.  There are several factors that make netbooks appealing–light weight, compact size, long battery life, low prices. These are good features, and the primary reasons I like my own netbook.  However, its utility is limited in scope.

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In recent days, we’ve seen more and more movement on the Linux Gaming front.  TransGaming has done a terrific job with their Cedega product of bringing games to the Linux platform.  MNTHGECC9VB9 Even more exciting for Linux users, we’re starting to see some developers gearing up to launch their product on all three platforms simultaneously (such as Heroes of Newerth).  Now that Valve’s Steam is available on MacOS, there’s even a lot of belief that a Linux release might be next.

So what does a gaming system for Linux look like?  Two of our support technicians, Daniel and Christopher, both run Linux on their personal desktop systems, so I thought I’d challenge them each to design a Linux gaming rig.  I also threw in a catch:  Keep the price under $999

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There’s a lot more to any particular piece of hardware than it’s polygon-crunching output, so I want to stay away from a bunch of bean-counting benchmarks (there’s plenty of great sites out there that do a terrific job at that). Instead, I’d like to focus on the hardware from the various perspectives of our departments, and what sort of experiences they’ve had.

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I wanted to share some fun before-and-after pictures of a system we were working on recently. If you don’t live near us here in Seattle, you might not know that we do computer repair too. We offer free diagnostic, and very reasonable rates on the work. (To be honest with you, we see local computer repair as a good way to spread word-of-mouth, not really as a moneymaker).

Anyhow, we have a customer who had just picked up his brand new Puget Deluge gaming computer, and he was really impressed with the cable and wiring job that our production team did. He mentioned that he had an old system laying around that he had built a few years ago, and asked if we could give it a bit of a face-lift.

So I wanted to pass along a few of these shots. Our build staff does a great job, and I’m glad to have a chance to feature a bit of their work!

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It came as quite a shock to me, then, when we were told to hold delivery of the drives to end-users this morning – just before our first shipment came in to the Puget warehouse. There was a lot of confusion, but it was clear that something was wrong with these first units – enough so that Newegg and other online vendors had also pulled them entirely from their sites. We too stopped listing them, and began contacting our customers who were expecting us to ship them out this afternoon. We couldn’t say much, though, since the details were still sketchy, and nothing was posted publicly online.

After several hours of waiting on Intel’s tech folks I am now pleased to be able to relay to our customers the status of the Intel drives. There is a defect in the units which causes data corruption if – and only if – a password is set on the drive in the system BIOS… and then changed or disabled later. Initially we were told this might require a complete reworking of the drives, and that those we had gotten in were effectively unusable, but Intel was able to work out a firmware fix for the problem. That won’t be available immediately, but should be showing up in about two weeks.

In light of this set of circumstances, we are contacting all of our customers who already purchased to let them decide if they want the drives now, with full understanding of the situation, or if they want to wait till we get units with the updated firmware from Intel. Since few people seem to put BIOS passwords on their hard drives the overwhelming response so far has been to ship them out, but we want to make sure that we work with each of our customers to get them the results that are best suited to their needs.

One other interesting tidbit is that Intel is not going to be shipping more of these until they have the firmware fix, so there will likely be a shortage of the drives for the next couple weeks (especially depending on how other vendors handle their existing orders). We will continue to sell the stock that we have, though – and any others we can get through suppliers – so that we can meet customer demand and get these high-performance SSDs to the masses!

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