PC Gear

I had never seen this magazine before I stumbled across it at a railway station newsagent on a trip up to London. A quick flick through the pages didn't look particularly promising but, I hate train journeys and thought I might as well check it out in order to waste a bit of time on the way. PC Gear is a pretty general magazine, which doesn't focus on any one aspect of computing in particular, but rather covers a wide variety of the things which are of general interest to computer users. It covers a wide range of issues, reviews, hints, news etc. and as such its appeal should be universal among computer users, but only if the quality is there... ...

PC Gear is a new computer magazine, which claims to be different from all the others. It contains the expected articles and reviews on hardware, Internet sites, games and other software, but there is much more to it than that. It is clearly aiming to be fun and humorous, with much of its information coloured with sarcasm. At first I found this laddish and silly, but was soon laughing in spite of myself. I particularly enjoyed their 10 reasons to upgrade to Windows Millennium Edition, which included "you want to kill some time" and "your PC is too fast and you have too much space on your hard disc"! As someone who has had enormous problems with ...

PC Gear is trying to hit a middle ground between a PC games magazine, a lads magazine (a la Maxim/FHM) and shiny technology magazine (TTT/Stuff for Men). Often it suceeds, with very good round ups of the latest technology and gadgets, good reviews of serious software products and a round up of the better game son the market. Where it fails is in the filler. Several pages which are just web site listings is dull. I do not need a top 5 disaster movie sites, or top 5 sites dedicated to children's TV in the 1980's. If I want such things, I'll find it on the web. it'd be okay if there was just one or two of these filler features, but there's ...