How are product reviews like good martinis?
Both are best when dirty. That’s clearly your feeling (at least when it comes to reviews). An overwhelming portion of you support our testing of products on dirty, well-worn PCs–meaning they’re full of Windows detritus, just like yours and mine–instead of pristine, clean PCs, and let the chips fall where they may. But here’s the rub: No two boxes are dirty in the same way. This issue cropped up when we tested Pinnacle Studio MovieBox DV, for example. It did great in our tests. But fully 86 percent of CNET readers rated it el crappo. I supected that maybe our test system was a bit too clean, giving our PC an unfair advantage over your real-world ones. Well, after investigating the matter, I found that the disparity in performance had more to do with a firmware revision than with the condition of our test bed. (In other words, we were testing a later version of the product, while you probably stayed up for three nights trying to make the earlier, buggy one work.) But that doesn’t disco
