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.
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?
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.
When we began development of our Echo PC, we quickly saw how NIVIDA ION would bring a new life to home theater PCs. The small form factor, low power draw, and near-silent operation are the perfect makings for a computer in the living room. As more content is put online, the PC is fast becoming a cheap alternative for home entertainment. But the strength of NVIDIA ION lies in the GPU, and applications that take advantage of GPU acceleration are anything but mature. In our testing, we found that ION was extremely well suited for DVD/BLU-RAY playback, and for Netflix. But Hulu — the final piece in the trio of current online entertainment — was not ready. Fullscreen playback was not acceptable on ION. We knew that NVIDIA and Adobe were working together on the problem. We waited.
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.
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.
You’ve probably seen that old scene a thousand times – some guy is putting the finishing touches on his house of cards or stack of dominoes, 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.
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.
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?
Puget Systems builds custom workstations, servers and storage solutions tailored for your work.
We provide:
Extensive performance testing
making you more productive and giving better value for your money
Reliable computers
with fewer crashes means more time working & less time waiting
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