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Jon is the president of the company.  He is frequently exposed to opinions of the managers from all departments, so his comments on parts frequently come from the perspective of overall worth to the company.

NVIDIA GTX 295: Bad choice for liquid cooling?

April 5, 2009 – 3:48 pm by Jon Bach

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?

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Jon is the president of the company.  He is frequently exposed to opinions of the managers from all departments, so his comments on parts frequently come from the perspective of overall worth to the company.

OS Trends Over Time: XP vs. Vista, 32-bit vs. 64-bit

March 22, 2009 – 11:55 am by Jon Bach

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!

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Jon is the president of the company.  He is frequently exposed to opinions of the managers from all departments, so his comments on parts frequently come from the perspective of overall worth to the company.

How accurate is ResellerRatings.com?

March 16, 2009 – 4:24 pm by Jon Bach

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?

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Jon is the president of the company.  He is frequently exposed to opinions of the managers from all departments, so his comments on parts frequently come from the perspective of overall worth to the company.

Are Extreme PCs Going Away?

March 12, 2009 – 11:46 am by Jon Bach

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.

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Jon is the president of the company.  He is frequently exposed to opinions of the managers from all departments, so his comments on parts frequently come from the perspective of overall worth to the company.

How SEO Built Our Business

March 11, 2009 – 12:21 pm by Jon Bach

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!

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Building a $16,000+ PC

March 4, 2009 – 4:42 pm by Perry Azevedo

system profile -- front rightWe’ve been receiving a lot of media, blog and Twitter attention regarding the “$16,000+ PC” we built late last year. While most of the reviews have been favorable, the comment fields have been their usual mix of reactions and name-calling. LOL! The extra attention has definitely been fun, although I think our web servers would disagree!!!

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.

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Jon is the president of the company.  He is frequently exposed to opinions of the managers from all departments, so his comments on parts frequently come from the perspective of overall worth to the company.

Intel Core i7 Temperatures

February 26, 2009 – 12:32 pm by Jon Bach

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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Jon is the president of the company.  He is frequently exposed to opinions of the managers from all departments, so his comments on parts frequently come from the perspective of overall worth to the company.

The New Puget Office! – Construction Video

February 4, 2009 – 4:12 pm by Jon Bach

I’m very happy to be writing this post from our new offices, where we have been operating now for two weeks. When we bought a new warehouse last May, I can honestly say I had no idea how much time and effort it would take to get the construction done and our company moved. Now that we’re done, I’m excited to be back and focusing on the business (not the building!). Having purchased this building, there are two messages I want to make sure to put out there:

  1. We are here to stay. In this difficult economy, there is a lot of concern over small businesses and their survival. Who wants to buy a computer from a company that won’t be around tomorrow? We’re putting our money where our mouth is when we say we’re not going anywhere. Yep, this economy is tough, but we’re solid and have no intentions of wavering!

  2. We are well positioned for growth. We’re no longer putting a huge chunk of our overhead into rent — now we’re paying a mortgage. With every month that passes from this point from this point forward, we’re building equity and with it, the ability to execute bigger plans. We’re definitely growing as a player in our industry, and I’m excited about that.

When we began construction, we set up a few cameras, each taking a picture once a second. With that, we’ve assembled a time lapse video documenting our construction and move-in. Enjoy!

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Jon is the president of the company.  He is frequently exposed to opinions of the managers from all departments, so his comments on parts frequently come from the perspective of overall worth to the company.

Our experiences with memory manufacturers

January 29, 2009 – 6:24 pm by Jon Bach

When it comes to memory manufacturers, we’ve been around the block…a few times.  We’ve learned a lot in the process — too much to keep to ourselves!  For each memory manufacturer we’ve used in the past, we have thousands of sticks of memory out in the field, and that gives us some good objective experience.  I wanted to take a minute to comment on the various memory manufacturers we have experience with, share our stories, and to explain why we are standardizing on Kingston memory going forward.

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The New Puget Office! – Tour #3

January 2, 2009 – 9:18 am by Perry Azevedo

The walls are up, the grid is being installed, the paint is drying. Take one more, quick tour of our unfinished warehouse as the construction nears completion!

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