PCWorld’s top N

Although I was a regular with PCWorld (marketed and translated as "Mikro - PC World" in Serbia), I stopped reading it after the overall quality of it's contents degraded below my personal threshold. To be more specific, I'm talking about 4 full page marathons dedicated towards projector reviews, almost every issue, 8 page Windows "never before seen" tips that usually tell you how to defragment your hard disk and turn off window animations (alltogether - boring, beginner class mouthwash - repeating itself yearly), and the lack of fresh news that you would usually find on digg. Now, that may be the localized version that I am reading, but I'm sure that the situation is quite similar over in the USA.

Nowadays, I mostly read the online version a few times per month, only to be dissapointed by some oh-not-so-wonderful articles that have an, I must admit, tempting title - "top xx at xxx" (replace missing areas accordingly). I have no clue why titles that number and compair similar products/events like "Top 10 April Fools' Day Joke Web Sites" and "Google's Top 17 Easter Eggs, Gags, and Hoaxes" attract so much attention, but their contents are generally not so fresh or exciting as one might think. Compiled web finds with a few dashes of author's opinion are not so hot anymore, and linking them to the MTV top charts is not helping either... I miss the old days when authors actually gave opinions about products, instead of following the current "trends"and fabricating their articles to the public's liking. One example: Windows XP was first reviewed as a major release that would shake the world, bring new features to PCs and brighten the overall outdated Windows gray screen... The activation feature was said to be "not bad at all", and the speed was far greater than w2k and w98x builds. What happened later? New users complained about w9x software refusing to work with the XP's NT backend, driver nightmares, visual bloat etc... PCWorld was quick to follow, labelling the activation feature as a nag, XP as slow (thus offering the, ever so great and useful, "speed up tips") and advocated that Windows 98 was still a very good choice for todays computing. XP vs Vista today? Very similar... It won't be long after another previous Windows version vs. current Windows version showdown takes place.

As soon as PCWorld starts writing quality stuff again, I'll be ready to read paper again like in the ol' days... Until then, I'll "enjoy" the articles they have now, and the videos that are embedded in their, sad to say, crappy video player.

Add comment March 28th, 2008