Dealing with shipping damage

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.

NVIDIA GTX 295: Bad choice for liquid cooling?

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?

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!