What I Wish I Had Known

As part of my job at Puget Systems, I speak with many of our customers at various stages of ownership that range from about a week to a couple of years. These customers often share feedback that we use to improve our products and services.

Occasionally customers share what they wish they had done differently when they were configuring their computers. I share this information with our sales team, and figured it might be helpful to those of you considering a new computer today.

So in the vein of “If I could do it all over again…” here are a number of items our customers would change if they could turn back time:

The Continual Rise of the SSD

Just over a year ago I wrote how Solid State Drives (SSD) were soaring in popularity. At that time we offered a number of SSD models from Intel. But due to production constraints, we were on the verge of adding a few Samsung SSDs to the mix. Around this same time we began fielding a number of requests for Samsung SSDs.

Once considered a luxury item, SSDs have moved into the mainstream within the past two years. Our customers tend to be tech savvy and performance demanding to the core. So I wasn’t surprised to find widescale adoption of SSDs as I dove into the sales data.

Puget Picks: Intel X25 SSD

This is the first edition in a series of (hopefully) weekly blog posts titled “Puget Picks”. Our goal is to shine a spotlight on some hardware that we’ve been recently impressed with.

There’s a lot more to any particular piece of hardware than it’s polygon-crunching output, so I want to stay away from a bunch of bean-counting benchmarks (there’s plenty of great sites out there that do a terrific job at that). Instead, I’d like to focus on the hardware from the various perspectives of our departments, and what sort of experiences they’ve had.

Minor Hiccup on New Intel SSDs

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.