Message text written by Eric Hammarberg:
>I don't trust CR on many things. The products they test are ususally
consumer products, not industrial.<

I have used CR for research on some purchases (especially cars), but I
always count them as but one of many sources, and ultimately make up my own
mind. They did point me in the direction of one of the nicer little cars I
have had (Ford Festiva, a real sleeper of a great urban runabout), but on
some kinds of product I have thought they were a little flaky. When I
worked in a camera store (1978-80), we always knew when the camera issue of
CR came out because we started getting a lot of calls for some esoteric
brand of camera that no one actually carried. CR's basic philosophy of
choosing the best product regardless of whether it is a major brand
sometimes led to some odd recommendations from the point of view of
availability or compatibility with existing systems (to pro photographers
there are two brands of camera: Nikon and everything else, which is a big
argument in favor of Nikon as a choice for the serious photographer,
although there are other brands of professional quality). In some
fast-changing high-tech categories, they have had to acknowledge that by
the time they get into print, they're already superseded and just offer
guidelines for evaluating products. 

BTW, I have found that the pipeline for computer hardware is so long that
what you see in the retail stores has in most instances already been
superseded and discontinued by the manufacturers. The hard drive sizes in
the stores are smaller than those currently being manufactured. Found this
out when I wanted a bigger HDD for my computer and had trouble finding one
that was bigger than what it had but small enough for the machine to
recognize it. 

Techno Geek