Where Now?

I wrote earlier about my funk after attending a local computer show HERE. I received a number of emails with similar impressions, confirming the sea-change in this business, most notably as laptops now account for the majority of PC sales.

I had bookmarked almost every PC hardware site that I ran across in the last ten years and after clicking through this list, I found that at least 80% were defunct.

So this leads me to a soul-searching question for our readers:

More of the same? More laptop stuff? Viking funeral? Broaden out to other electronics gadgets? What?

Obviously there are no right or wrong answers, so let it fly. As usual, someone will win a prize for responding, drawn at random.

2/25/08: Many thanks for the overwhelming response from our readers! Many of you took the time to write very thoughtful responses which I enjoyed reading very much. I thought Seth’s response was particularly noteworthy and hit the notes I think we should play:

“I’ll start out by telling you what I don’t want to see happen.

I don’t want to see Overclockers become like Anandtech or Xbitlabs. We don’t need just another hardware review site. Overclockers is a different kind of site – it’s about making the most from what you can afford. I think what it should focus is not a matter of Laptop/Desktop/PDA, but more simply how to buy the cheap PDA and use all the features of the high end PDA; how to buy a laptop that one can use to overvolt and overclock when needed and undervolt, and underclock it further than EIST/C1E goes to get that extra battery life.

As has been said many times, Desktops have evolved from the 1990’s, where it’s simply was a matter of buying a CPU, mobo and gfx and hoping you could overclock it some. Nowadays you spend extra to get the parts that overclock, you don’t buy the generic parts. The thing is with these new popular tech items much of the old method is possible.

I don’t want to see Overclockers.com become a review site, or a site that talks about new products being released. I want Ed’s insightful articles (and they really are insightful and bring good info about companies) or the article or “look at XXX with this software and this you can make it turn into the expensive model”.

I think really what shows this is the article where you showed how to make the throw away video camera into a reusable camera. (Overclocking the CVS Videocam) That is the spirit of overclocking. It’s taking that camera and modding it slightly to get more out of it than was intended. I think as long as we stay on a course that involves articles like that, it will be fine.”

I’m basically a cheap guy – I want the best but I don’t want to pay for it. I also don’t go gaga over technology for technology’s sake. Many times you don’t need the latest and greatest – one generation or two back may be cheaper and do the job perfectly.

But overarching all this is one ethic that will never change – giving our audience our unvarnished, unbiased views whatever they are and wherever they may lead.

And the winner, picked at random, for a prize is Jeremy Kusek – thanks to all for participating!

Email Joe