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

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!

How accurate is ResellerRatings.com?

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?

How SEO Built Our Business

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!

Building a $16,000+ PC

We’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!!!

Intel Core i7 Temperatures

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.