Puget Systems Blog

Core i3/i5/i7 Processors – Making Sense of Intel’s New CPU Line

William George — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:34:42 +0000

When Intel first debuted the Core i7 processor line, code-named Nehalem, in late 2008 it made perfect sense. This line of quad-cores brought several new technologies: Turbo Mode, integrated memory controllers, triple-channel RAM, and Hyperthreading (making a comeback from the Pentium 4 era). There were three processors at launch, a 920, 940 and 965 – each slightly faster than the one before it, with the ‘5′ at the end of the last denoting that it was an Extreme Edition chip with some unlocked settings to help with overclocking. Over time the 940 was replaced with a 950, and then 960; the 965 also got an upgrade in the form of a 975. The naming scheme now isn’t so simple — let’s take a look.

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TV Tuner Update – 2010

William George — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:51:21 +0000

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.

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Written by William for Puget Systems Blog. | Permalink | 5 comments

Features are not always selling points

Jon Bach — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 04:03:08 +0000

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?

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Signs of a turning economy?

Jon Bach — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:48:04 +0000

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.

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Adobe Flash 10.1 – Big News for Home Theater

Jon Bach — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:53:10 +0000

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.

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New Website Design

Perry Azevedo — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:42:15 +0000

The News:

We are very pleased to announce that as of today: Monday, October 26, 2009, we are launching a brand new redesign of the Puget Systems website!

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.

This is only the beginning…

If you find any bugs, please let us know. Just as well, this new design is only the foundation. Over the next few months, you’ll see many more navigational changes, UI improvements, and minor tweaks here and there, which will further make the site easier to navigate, friendlier to use, and more powerfully able to serve you. If you have any suggestions or would like to report on how the new design is working, please email us at: webmaster@pugetsystems.com or try posting in our forums.

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Minor Hiccup on New Intel SSDs

William George — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:23:44 +0000

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. There was a lot of confusion, but it was clear that something was wrong with these first units – enough so that Newegg and other online vendors had also pulled them entirely from their sites. We too stopped listing them, and began contacting our customers who were expecting us to ship them out this afternoon. We couldn’t say much, though, since the details were still sketchy, and nothing was posted publicly online.

After several hours of waiting on Intel’s tech folks I am now pleased to be able to relay to our customers the status of the Intel drives. There is a defect in the units which causes data corruption if – and only if – a password is set on the drive in the system BIOS… and then changed or disabled later. Initially we were told this might require a complete reworking of the drives, and that those we had gotten in were effectively unusable, but Intel was able to work out a firmware fix for the problem. That won’t be available immediately, but should be showing up in about two weeks.

In light of this set of circumstances, we are contacting all of our customers who already purchased to let them decide if they want the drives now, with full understanding of the situation, or if they want to wait till we get units with the updated firmware from Intel. Since few people seem to put BIOS passwords on their hard drives the overwhelming response so far has been to ship them out, but we want to make sure that we work with each of our customers to get them the results that are best suited to their needs.

One other interesting tidbit is that Intel is not going to be shipping more of these until they have the firmware fix, so there will likely be a shortage of the drives for the next couple weeks (especially depending on how other vendors handle their existing orders). We will continue to sell the stock that we have, though – and any others we can get through suppliers – so that we can meet customer demand and get these high-performance SSDs to the masses!

Written by William for Puget Systems Blog. | Permalink | 45 comments

Puget Systems on Facebook

Perry Azevedo — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:35:29 +0000

Puget Systems has been slowly joining the ranks of the Social Media circles. As of now, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In.

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Dealing with shipping damage

Richard A. Millard — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:47:35 +0000

You’ve probably seen that old clichéd scene a thousand times – some guy is putting the finishing touches on his house of cards or stack of dominos, 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.

Your typical shipping damage might include an unseated video card, or even a dislodged processor heatsink. However, the package we just recieved back takes the cake!

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Windows 7 Release Candidate – Awesome OS, free for 10 months!

William George — Sat, 09 May 2009 17:21:34 +0000

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.

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Written by William for Puget Systems Blog. | Permalink | 6 comments