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Newsletters June
2008 The
last month has been hectic: Kustom computers have been rolling out of the
workshop in record amounts: Now why can’t people buy like that at
Christmastime? In a break with tradition there have been one or two upgrades
commissioned by associates and friends; which has led us to look at the
product line a little more closely: The drab simplistic baseline models are
becoming things of the past, as the new builds commissioned are becoming more
up-to-date and sophisticated. To
emphasize the point that the default designs are only baseline examples of
what we have built, rather than
being all that we do build, you’ll notice that we’ve removed some of the
links on most pages to individual baseline designs, and amalgamated them into
a single page accessible from a single link in the sidebar under “Some of Our
Successes”. From the single amalgamated picture-less page you can browse the
baseline designs individually if you so desire. – But as our orders show;
customers are looking for newer and more cosmetically appealing designs in
general – And Kustom Komputa can, do, and will, deliver the goods. We’ve
been looking at the Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H recently; we
incorporated one in one of the upgrades we did: This board is quality,
well-designed, good-looking, and cool-running: AMD chipset, ATI graphics, and
our favourite Socket AM2. It’ll run a triple or quad-core AMD Phenom; but we
suggest a proper AM2+ board for the purpose. We used an Athlon 64 X2 4800+
2.5GHz energy-efficient processor; and we couldn’t get any component up to 30
degrees Celsius no matter how heavily we loaded it or how long we ran it for.
The board has 4 RAM slots taking DDR2 up to and including 800MHz: We loaded
it with 4 x 1 gig sticks of PC6400 (800MHz) and it ran XP faster than we’ve
ever seen XP run before. (As expected XP didn’t see the entire amount of RAM;
only 3.5 gig, of which 250 meg was used by the graphics – which offer
s-Video, DVI, VGA, and HDMI, all on one board!) The slots are capable of
taking 16 gigs of RAM, and the board is certified for running Windows At this point I must add that as a rule Kustom Komputa
don’t normally do upgrades unless it’s to an existing customer’s Kustom
computer: However by making this exception we went on an exciting
learning-curve and added a new motherboard to our good-books: What would you
say to a GA-MA69GM-SH in a stylish iCute case…all for under £500 including
CPU, RAM, HDD, the lot? Recently we’ve had someone take issue with our no-Linux
policy – Which in all honesty we’d forgotten about: “The use of…Linux…will invalidate all warranties…” appears
somewhere on the Exel page: This was from the early days when we’d just
started up, and the only computer design available at that time was a
Kustomised Exel. (Everyone has to start somewhere!) Fact: Exel computers in
whatever form, don’t like running and will normally not run, Linux – Any Linux
distro. The text should in fact read “…will invalidate all Kustom Komputa warranties.
(Manufacturer’s parts warranties still stand- Our bad.) …So if you own Exel
then you can try to run Linux on it if you like, and if you do manage it then
let us know how, as we never managed it. (-Other than in a Virtual Machine.)
Your components will still be covered by the manufacturer’s warranty through
Kustom Komputa; but don’t send it back to us stating that it won’t work with
a Linux distro installed as the main os because we know it won’t work with
Linux as the main os. – Hence the original statement. If it won’t run Windows, any Windows version up to and
including XP, then send it back to us. If it won’t run Linux then install Windows
again. (Exel wasn’t built to run So as another flaming June begins as another flaming
washout, we continue to advance at a pace which is hopefully fast enough to
keep up. Enjoy the summer. (- If we didn’t already have the summer during
that week in early May.) April 2008 Another newsletter at last! It’s been a long time; getting
from there to here – But needs be as needs must, and Kustom Komputa have been
so busy that there’s just not been any time to spare for newsletters since
January. I can’t speak for the entire white-box industry; but certainly
with this company sales of We hope you all like the new layout of the website: We’ve been
working away busily throughout the first part of this year on it, and
although the revamp hasn’t been as total as we’d have liked, we hope that the
site is both clearer and better than before. If you have any comments then
you may have noticed we’ve introduced a “Have Your Say” page, on which you
can comment away to your heart’s content. AMD are finally producing Phenoms
properly; triple-core and quad-core, and motherboards to accommodate them are
appearing. Kustom Komputa haven’t yet produced or been requested for any
Phenom-powered systems at time of writing; but it’s early days, and we’re
looking into building some prototypes and benchmarking to assess the overall
performance of the chips as and when so that we can bring you the customer
further information to assist you in your choice of specification. Last year (2007) we were taking the company in a direction of
sales of variations of baseline designs based upon our customer’s individual
specifications: Whilst this could be seen as being a bit narrow-minded in
some ways we nevertheless intend to continue on this tack to a certain extent
during 2008 regarding the existing baseline designs which still remain the
most popular, in addition to experimenting with emerging technologies and providing
customers with wholly unique boxes to whatever extent we are able to do so.
As a small company in a vast industry we must, however, realise our
limitations and that we are not Microsoft-sized, nor do we have the budget of
PC World. (Probably because we are fair to our customers in this cutthroat
industry rather than trying to make a lot whilst giving as little as
possible; but such is life, and for us to create a reputation of which we can
feel proud it is necessary.) We’ve improved the Quotation Request form yet again – and I
know you see it getting more and more complicated; but unless we know exactly
what you want we can’t provide it – So all the detail is for the purpose of
assessing your preliminary requirements to a larger extent rather than trying
to catch you out: It’s a request, not an exam – so if there’s anything you
can’t answer just fill in the “don’t know” option and we’ll try and discuss
the matter further in the follow-up email correspondence if it’s of
importance. Yes we ask many questions: If we didn’t we wouldn’t be able to
provide you with what you want and we’d end up selling out to PC World and
providing cloned off-the-shelf systems just like they do. While we’re still Kustom Komputa, however, we’ll continue to provide the
individual and unique systems that you’ve come to expect of us.
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