Product Reviews Blog

A little while ago I was approached by AusPC-Market of Sydney to see if I would be interested in undertaking reviews of Media Center related products. This seemed like a good idea as it would enable our members to get involved in the evaluation of the latest Media Center products, and also add another section with original content to the website.

So whilst chatting with a few of our longer term members I learned that they would be happy to assist, so we grabbed some gear and gave it a workout. The first round includes a case, two systems and a wireless keyboard. My thanks to GlenR and ExtremePC for being our guinea review pigs, or is that reviews guinea pigs, or should it be ...

For my part I added a Wordpress powered blog, and thanks to a very neat script I discovered, I was able to bridge the blog content to the VBulletin database. This means that forum members are automatically added to the blog's user database and can therefore add their comments. Another neat part of the bridge is that the comment handler script has been modified and now uses the forum software, so in addition to all reviews posted in the blog automatically appearing as a forum posts, replies also appear as replies in the thread!

Of course it's new ground for all of us and so we could be a little rough around the edges to begin with, but with the full support of the guys over at AusPC-Market we are committed to providing completely frank, "warts-n-all" reviews to assist everybody during their next hardware decision.

At the moment we have four reviews to get us underway, but we plan on adding more each week which should see it fill it up quickly. Of course if there is a specific piece of kit you'd like to see given a thorough going over let me know, and if anybody sees themselves as the next big thing in product reviews authorship, contact me and I'll be happy to add you to the list.

If you're a hardware or software vendor and would like to see your new product undressed and bared to the world, send me a PM or email and we can discuss how to go about it.

So under this thread you'll see the output from the first round of reviews, but to go straight to the Reviews Blog itself use http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/techreviews - and you'll wind up back here again anyway!

Mike