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.

Information about the Intel Sandy Bridge Flaw

You may have heard about the flaw announced today with Intel’s Sandy Bridge platform. Here is a quote from Intel’s press release:

“As part of ongoing quality assurance, Intel Corporation has discovered a design issue in a recently released support chip, the Intel® 6 Series, code-named Cougar Point, and has implemented a silicon fix. In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives. The chipset is utilized in PCs with Intel’s latest Second Generation Intel Core processors, code-named Sandy Bridge. Intel has stopped shipment of the affected support chip from its factories. Intel has corrected the design issue, and has begun manufacturing a new version of the support chip which will resolve the issue. The Sandy Bridge microprocessor is unaffected and no other products are affected by this issue.

The company expects to begin delivering the updated version of the chipset to customers in late February and expects full volume recovery in April. Intel stands behind its products and is committed to product quality. For computer makers and other Intel customers that have bought potentially affected chipsets or systems, Intel will work with its OEM partners to accept the return of the affected chipsets, and plans to support modifications or replacements needed on motherboards or systems. …”

What does this mean for Puget Systems customers?

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John works full time in our production department, working directly with the hardware.  He assembles machines, and works on repairing machines.  He has some of the most first-hand hardware experience in the company.

Home Theater PC – John’s Approach

This is the third in a series of blog posts about Home Theater Computers (aka HTPCs), where several Puget employees get a chance to explain their approach to home theater computing.  My approach is distinctly different than the previous entries, which can be found here:  Richard’s, William’s.

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William is one of our most knowledgeable sales consultants.  He works with customer requests full time every day, and his opinion of hardware is usually shaped by his thorough understanding of customer needs and requests.

Windows 7 64-bit: Running 32-bit Applications

Windows 7
Windows 7 has taken root in the PC community over the last year, a great improvement from the little-liked Windows Vista, and we’ve made the 64-bit version the de facto standard on the computers we sell – to the point where we no longer even list the 32-bit version on our website. We can special-order it still, though, and I find that I am often asked by customers if they would be better off with that because they need to run older programs. This makes me think there may be some misunderstandings about 64-bit Windows out there, so let me set the record straight.

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Richard is the general manager of our sales and support departments.  He is frequently exposed to requests from customers as well as any escalated problems that come up in support tickets, so his comments are usually derived from his experience with both aspects.

Home Theater PC – Richard’s Approach

This is the second in a series of blog posts about Home Theater Computers (aka HTPCs), where several Puget employees get a chance to explain their approach to home theater computing.  You can read William’s entry here.

If I had to sum up the goals of my home theater with a single word, it would be “Convenience”.  I actually don’t spent that much time in my living room, but when I do, I really want to minimize hassle.  I don’t mind a lot of work setting things up the first time, but I just don’t want to waste my precious R&R time juggling five remotes, three pointing devices, and a keyboard.

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Ruben works full time in our production department, working directly with the hardware.  He assembles machines, and works on repairing machines.  He has some of the most first-hand hardware experience in the company.

Upgrading my wireless network

In the Romero home we have three systems that heavily use the internet in one way or another, two of which are connected wirelessly. Our trusty Linksys WRT54G has been our gateway to the world wide web, but recently the router has been suffering as heavier loads have been put on it. With a subscription to Netflix and a Steam account playing those highly addictive online FPS’ games, the demand for internet among the three systems has become overwhelming, especially on the computers operating on wireless.

Since my every-day system is hard wired, I didn’t pay much of any attention to the wireless portion of my network. As time went on, arising issues took their natural annoying course. So I had to make some changes, and wanted a faster and more reliable network. This also gave me the opportunity to move some things around in our home and delegate new or different tasks to our three systems.
 

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William is one of our most knowledgeable sales consultants.  He works with customer requests full time every day, and his opinion of hardware is usually shaped by his thorough understanding of customer needs and requests.

Home Theater PC – William’s Approach

This is the first in a series of blog posts about Home Theater Computers (aka HTPCs). It’s really neat to see how people approach their home theater experience differently, so several of us were asked to write about our setup, what we chose, and why we chose it.
 
I’ve always been a proponent of using computers and technology to make our lives easier and more enjoyable, and one place I’ve focused on implementing that idea has been in relation to entertainment. I remember watching DVDs and listening to music on my computer as early as the mid 90s, and by the late 90s I had a TV tuner in my computer. I’ve owned several brands and models of tuners since then, but I didn’t make that type of functionality the focus of a dedicated computer until I got married.
 
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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.

What is the value of a quality PC?

This evening, I came across a forum thread online, in which users of electronic trading workstations were comparing Puget Systems to other PC builders (mainly bargain basement PC builders). An owner of one of our PC’s posted the following:

“I paid a $600 premium for my last computer from Puget. Since I typically keep a computer for about three years, I’m paying about 55 cents a day extra to have super reliable trading machines backed up by great customer service. For me, it’s worth it because computer problems mean time away from trading and/or time away from my wife and kids. Everybody has to make his own price/value decision.”

I love the thought process!

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William is one of our most knowledgeable sales consultants.  He works with customer requests full time every day, and his opinion of hardware is usually shaped by his thorough understanding of customer needs and requests.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 – Mercury Playback Engine

nvidiaadbeTraditionally, over at least the past 15 years, the main role of a video card in a computer has been to accelerate 3D graphics. That is a large part of what has made modern computer games possible, and it has also contributed heavily to CAD / CAM work and digital animation.  Video cards have also helped with 2D graphics and video playback, but the main focus has been on 3D speed. 

This trend is beginning to change, though. As CPUs have seemed to reach an upper limit on pure clock speed many programmers are looking elsewhere for ways to improve performance in a variety of programs. Designing software to take advantage of multi-core processors has been a big benefit, as is the push toward 64-bit software that can use more RAM. Video cards are also being explored as a source of more processing power, and in situations where their massively-parallel architecture can be harnessed effectively it can be a huge benefit.

One such situation is video editing, and many smaller programs and plug-ins have been making use of either CUDA (for nVidia cards) or Stream (ATI) to accelerate video encoding. The recent launch of Adobe’s latest version of Premiere Pro – CS5 – marks the first instance of a major editing program adding this kind of functionality. In order to use this feature in Premiere Pro, though, you need to have the right video card – so I’d like to take a moment to describe the situation, hopefully helping our customers to make an informed choice when upgrading or buying a new computer.

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Daniel is a sales consultant with a focus on servers.  We also has a background as our lead support technician.  He has the most technical knowledge of any of our staff, and his comments frequently come from the perspective of trying to eliminate as many support issues as possible.

Is Starcraft 2 breaking video cards?

aprils-best-selling-games-20070518113310402Along with a few other guys here at Puget, I’ve been really enjoying Blizzard’s new game – Starcraft 2.  While the basic gameplay remains the same, Blizzard has definitely brought Starcraft into the 21st century, with updated graphics, better game control mechanics, better online matchmaking, great cinematics, and overall a much smoother and more intuitive experience.

I’ve been seeing some reports of menu screens on Starcraft 2 causing poorly ventilated, or poorly designed graphics cards to fail.  Does this sound familiar?  It definitely sounds familiar to me.

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Making a bootable USB Key

Hello fellow Puget enthusiasts! My name is Kyle, welcome to my first ever entry on this blog. My job here at Puget is to take your newly built system and prepare it for the real world. Mainly, I’m in charge of installations and testing. This includes OS and application installations, all software updates, installation of any additional hardware we may have been waiting for and any specific customizations you the customer may have requested. From there I do a full range of testing, both the physical and logical. This is done to ensure that your computer meets our high standards. One thing I quickly came to discover is how much of a headache the installation department can be if you don’t have the right tools. Yes, a trusty screw driver is important, but a trusty USB key is irreplaceable (until you make a new one).

So let’s jump right into it. I’m here today to show you how to create a bootable USB key which, when placed in the right hands, can do almost anything. From my key I can boot into DOS and run any DOS based application/utility I may need. I can also load grub4dos which allows me to boot .iso files among other things. This article simply shows you how to make your key bootable. I’ll put together some more blog posts in the future, and highlight some of the useful things these can do.

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