 It has been almost two years since I last wrote on the subject of TV tuners in computers, and a lot has changed since then. Over-the-air TV signals have finally gone all-digital, and many cable providers have reduced or dropped their analog cable lineups as well. These transitions, coupled with the release of Windows 7, mean that this year should be an exciting one for those of us with home-theater PCs. Share this blog post!
We all seem to like our products with lots of features, especially when it comes to computers. After all, the personal computer is supposed to be the most versatile piece of electronics that you own, right? How can it be versatile without a long list of features? When it comes down to deciding what product to buy, one of the first things we do is put the features side by side, and see which gives us more capabilities for the dollar. What are we missing? Share this blog post!
If you’re connected with me on Twitter or Facebook, you probably have noticed my recent posts about how great business has been, and how we’ve been more and more busy these past months. It has been a great feeling to once again focus my efforts on expanding our capacity to meet demand. But why have our sales picked up so heavily in the last quarter? Is this due to a gain in market share, or is this something bigger? I don’t claim to have the answers, but I would like to go over the data and our theories. Share this blog post!
Share this blog post!
The News:We are very pleased to announce that as of today: Monday, October 26, 2009, we are launching a brand new redesign of the Puget Systems website! We’ve been hard at work over the past few months: designing, coding, testing, fixing. Although we’ve received lots of positive feedback on various functionality of the old site (configuration utility, order status updates, etc), we’ve also been less than pleased with the dated design and limited, navigational ability of the old design. What we’re unveiling today is the first step a vast improvement on top of what was already a great base. This is only the beginning…If you find any bugs, please let us know. Just as well, this new design is only the foundation. Over the next few months, you’ll see many more navigational changes, UI improvements, and minor tweaks here and there, which will further make the site easier to navigate, friendlier to use, and more powerfully able to serve you. If you have any suggestions or would like to report on how the new design is working, please email us at: webmaster@pugetsystems.com or try posting in our forums. Share this blog post!
It seems like everyone has been excited about the recent release of Intel’s second-generation solid state drives (SSDs) this week. I am the proud owner of one of the first-gen models, and the idea that more affordable models will help more people to adopt this technology is just cause for celebration. 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! Share this blog post!
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. Share this blog post!
You’ve probably seen that old clichéd 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!
To give you some specific context, this system was packed in foam, placed in a box, packed in further foam, and then finally into another triple-walled exterior box. There’s roughly 3 inches of cardboard and insulating foam between the computer and the world around it. My first guess was that the box fell off a truck and then got run over, but UPS tells me that it got bound up in their conveyer belt system. Yikes! Obviously, we feel pretty frustrated when something like this happens. That feeling is even worse for the customer who may need his system on a tight timeline. That was the case with this particular client, who had ordered his system from us with a deliberate goal of having it by the weekend. When he saw that UPS was returning the package to us due to shipping damage, he was pretty bummed out. When we heard about the damage, we went into action. Thanks to our production team, and especially Matthew who spent a majority of his day frantically building a replacement, we had the new system built, installed, benchmarked, tested and delivered by the next day! Despite the bad luck with his first system, we were able to divert resources and have a new one out to him before the weekend. To be truthful, we got pretty lucky that we weren’t missing any replacement hardware. With custom systems there’s no way to guarantee that we’ll have every part needed on any given day. That was part of the concept behind our workstation system – the Puget Obsidian – to offer same-day advance replacement on defective systems. Now we need your help! We don’t know what to do with this ruined computer! I’m taking any and all suggestions! Do we give it a viking burial in Puget Sound, or maybe something more contemporary? Share this blog post!
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. Share this blog post!
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? Share this blog post! |
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When we began development of our 
