Reviewing magazine reviews
(PCs, hardware and software)

Have you ever blindly relied on a magazine editor's opinion?

Not smart! We'll tell you why. A lot more goes into awards like "Editor's Choice", "Best Buy", "Highly Recommended" et al than you ever dreamed possible and you need to know some of that if you're going to get anywhere near taking the correct buying decisions. We're going to arm you with some inside secrets, some truths, some facts that will allow you to make the best choice irrespective of what the editor's recommendation is. And you will often choose differently. Without having to do all the painful research yourself.

The customer rarely has time to conduct detailed research prior to making a purchase - and who can blame him? The IT industry moves at a breakneck speed and it's a full time job keeping up with the latest developments. So, he relies on the magazines to review a collection of products and recommend one. Surely, if the experts have spent a lot of time and money testing, benchmarking and reviewing several products before making a recommendation you can't go wrong following their advice? Wrong! Isn't their informed choice better than yours? Not necessarily. And we'll tell you why later. We'll also give you all you need to read between the lines, to figure out which is the real best buy.

Our credentials

First, who are we to make these tall claims? We're a PC manufacturer of repute and we've been in the business for a decade ...which is an eternity for PC manufacturers. Some of them tend to go bust every year and reopen with a slightly different name. You know who we mean!

We've won more awards than we can count, month after month, in a variety of different IT publications like Computer Active, PCWorld, PC Direct, PC Advisor, PC Plus and others, online and offline. Even when we were a small two man band we were winning more awards - and more consistently - than some of our biggest competitors. We know what it takes to win awards in magazines. And you'll be surprised at how easy it really, really is :-)

Then why disclose what we know about how the industry works? What do we stand to gain from it? Ans: Nothing. We are not currently participating in any PC group tests the magazines regularly conduct. We are not submitting any other products for any reviews or write-ups. We are not looking for any more sales via that route so we feel free to let you in on what really goes on. Call it consumer empowering, call it letting the cat out of the bag, call it what you may, but note that you could be seriously better off for reading it.

The choice to stop submitting products was entirely ours. Since Jan 2005 we turned down every request we got for product submissions and stopped proactively looking for opportunities to get our products featured. We like to think that our relationships with the magazines, the staff at the mags, and the publishing houses behind them are still cordial. We will therefore not specifically criticise any particular mag or group. We will instead focus on bringing to your attention those facts that will enable you to make more informed decisions in your buying of PCs, PC hardware and PC software/services.

Bookmark this page and we will keep expanding on it in July/August 2005. In fact, we hope to put it together in the form of an e-book that you can download. And, yes, it will be free. Some topics we'll cover:

How does a company advertising in a magazine influence the reviews they get?

Flaws in the testing - even editors aren't infallible.

The most important information is regularly not disclosed to you, the buyer, because the magazines can't.

How some manufacturers fool the system and get awards they don't really deserve. And, how you can tell them apart.

Why the best deal may be the product languishing at rank 10/10.

How some manufacturers can really dictate terms to magazines.

Why magazines are still more impartial than most of the thousands of "review websites" out there.

... and lots more. Do yourself a favour, bookmark this page. :-)