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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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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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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Along 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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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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 A customer called today, who had heard the term ‘netbook’ but didn’t know what one was.  This seemed like a good chance to write a little primer about what a netbook is, and also what it isn’t. 

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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For most of the last decade we’ve carried Seasonic and Corsair power supplies as our the bulk of our lineup.  We’ve been extremely happy with both, but we’ve also slowly branched out and have been testing some other highly rated models.  Over the last few months, we’ve quietly added the Antec CP-850 to our lineup – and we’ve been extremely happy with it.  So with a few extra minutes today I wanted to write a little post about some of its impressive qualities!

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A quick explanation for people unfamiliar with Linux:  Linux is an operating system, much like Windows or MacOS.  It’s been around forever, it has a lot of different varieties, and it’s really good at doing certain things.  One of the things that it’s not been particularly good at, historically speaking, is playing games.

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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