Okay, so this page is so hopelessly out of date I’m not even going to attempt to rescue it at the moment.
Gridiron Solutions LLC
I’ve been working hard for the past few weeks to officially start a new company called Gridiron Solutions LLC. I will be reselling many different lines of electronics including digital cameras; GPS devices; personal computers, computer software, components and accessories; video game hardware, software and accessories; networking equipment; speakers; and flat panel televisions and monitors.
I have spent a lot of time researching this and filing paperwork, and I still have a long way to go. I am in the process of programming a website to be able to resell online. eBay won’t cut it for what I have planned. It will take me awhile to get everything working the way I want.
In the meantime I am willing to sell to anyone and everyone. I am not marking up my prices very much right now — I’m essentially selling at my cost which isn’t as good as you might think — but I’m sure my pricing structure will change once I launch my website. Unfortunately, since Gridiron Solutions an official business I need to collect sales tax from sales in Nebraska, whereas I don’t have to collect tax from sales made to customers outside of the state.
I have the potential to save you a lot of money over local retail stores on many items. I can also be competitive with many online businesses. As I place orders with my vendors I have minimum order amounts I have to meet in order to avoid small order charges as well as incentives to get free shipping. Going forward, as my customers help me meet those amounts I will be able to pass the savings on.
Gridiron Solutions will not be making much money right now; probably a handful of dollars here and there. I will be covering my costs and passing the rest of the savings on to my customers. I hope to build trust and relationships with my customers. As Gridiron Solutions’ revenue increases I hope its profits will start to increase too.
I know the U.S. economy is terrible right now and it’s probably supposed to be a bad time to start a business. I don’t care. I’m ready for the challenge. I’m going to work hard and attempt to be fiscally sound. I won’t get myself into financial trouble so the worst the economy can do is slow my company’s growth.
When I am finally able to launch Gridiron Solutions’ ecommerce website it will be much easier to quote pricing. For now I’ll just have to do a lot of manual work gathering my costs and setting my prices. If you would like me to quote you a price on something that runs on electricity — or even toasters, pots and pans, and cutlery –please send me an email or call me at (402) 770-3186. I look forward to seeing this company get off the ground.
Home Theater PC
I just finished building a cheap Windows Vista Media Center PC. My first impression of Windows Media Center is quite good. The interface is simple but elegant and at first look nothing too annoying seems to stick out. However, I am seeing some issues with speed. Changing channels seems slow and using the Guide is extremely slow. At first I thought this could be caused by the AVerMedia AVerTV Combo PCIe card I am using. But now that I’ve had a chance to browse my Video and Music files I think this may be a system resource problem. I’m using a 2 GB 800 MHz DDR2 DIMM so I doubt that’s the problem.
This leaves the processor or hard drive(s) as the likely problem. I chose an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Dual-Core processor because I was trying to keep costs down and my previous living room PC’s had 2 GHz or slower Intel Celeron CPU’s and ran just fine. I have two hard drives: one 200 GB SATA drive as my system drive and another 250 GB IDE drive for my downloads and videos. I’m going to do some monitoring to see if I can’t narrow down this problem.
My TV tuner card came with a remote control and so far I’m impressed with it. It seems to have enough buttons to do everything I need to do without being too complex. The system responds to the remote control quickly too which is always important.