Whether it is a laptop or new HD Ready TV or the latest DVD player with all "essential" add-ons, how does one decide just what is best or even high quality and good value? David Beattie
All purchases have an element of risk. Today, however, there is an unprecedented amount of information available online, from magazines such as PC Pro and Hi-Fi World, and from web-only sites such as Trusted Reviews and Digital Photography Review. Some shopping sites carry user reviews: this is one of the attractions of Amazon, for example. AV Forums is often useful when it comes to researching video and home cinema products.
When it comes to finding out what the problems are, the best sources are often company help forums. In some cases, you can find useful external sites by searching for the company or brand name with either "sucks" or "hell". At the moment, this category seems to be led by Talk Talk, rather than NTL or AOL.
Clearly, any product with a large user base is going to throw up some problems. Dell, for example, is shipping almost 40m PCs a year, so even if 95% of its users are happy, there could still be 6m or so with significant gripes. Still, I think you are much more likely to get a realistic view of a product by searching thousands of opinions via Google than the anecdotal evidence from a bloke in a pub who heard about it from a friend. And even if you don't get the best product, you can probably avoid the worst.
