Differences Between Writing for Dollars and Writing What you Think (Or Measure)

After a few days of seemingly coming to his senses, a popular ZDNet writer is back to praising Windows 7 yet again. I find this very disturbing, as I think you just can’t have it both ways. Either something is good, bad, or mediocre. You don’t get to choose any two of the above.

This is a very big problem with some sites, and they tend to be the ones that are most visible. Why are they most visible? Because they can afford to be; they are getting the advertising dollars, because they talk up those advertisers products.

PC Magazine and its offspring ExtremeTech, are more of the same. The writers there build bizarre combinations of machines that no one else would, as their personal systems, then praise the results. Why? Because they can, and those parts come free to them. Sure these systems work, and sure they are high performing, but are they the highest performing for the dollars spent? Don’t look on these sites, they won’t be writing about that.

You and I don’t get these free parts, and must do more to check out carefully what is said on these, and other websites and then learn to read between the lines.

For example, a certain build was done using a top of the line i7 CPU, motherboard, and DDR3 RAM. The build was to be used as a gaming machine, yet, if you look at the other sites on the web, less well visited, you see actual tests showing that that i7 is wasted in this instance. An AMD system using a Phenom II X4 will, for gaming, achieve the same frame rates in games, all else being equal.

What does this mean?

It means that putting the bragging rights of the i7 on the back burner, it is possible to spend more money on a graphics card, or cards, with less spent on motherboard, CPU, and RAM, and achieve better results in games with the same total out of pocket.

Do many sites tell you this outright? No, because I suspect that Intel dollars are much more free flowing than those of AMD. They can afford it.

If you go to the less travelled sites, you will find out things completely counter to what is being said on some of those well known sites; for example, the numbers of people who really don’t think Windows 7 is the best Windows OS ever. You won’t see this on ZDNet, because they are very pro-Microsoft, no doubt due to ad dollars. In fact, when I saw a few negative stories there last week, I thought the crew had lost their collective minds. Perhaps they did, but sanity (for them) has been restored this week, as Microsoft is, once again, the hot setup.

I say what I think, backed by my own experiences, on a mix of machines, both mine and others. Since I have worked on a great variety of machines, I know of little things with certain hardware combinations that cause problems. Should they? Of course not. But anyone who has worked on even a couple of machines, over time, will realize that all is not as it should be. Things are not perfect, and they aren’t getting any better, as no one is busy fixing problems found to occur on a miniscule number of machines – there is no money in that. That is why many times the fix for a problem must be an upgrade, hoping that someone took notice, and while preparing the updated part, or software, fixed the problem. ATi made a core business on this – the fact that they stayed in business long enough to be bought by AMD is astounding, since there are problems with their products to this day, from long ago.

Similarly, when I write about the things I don’t like about Vista, or Windows 7, or anything else, for that matter, it is because I have used the product, and find it lacking. If I find I am wrong, I say so. If, on the other hand someone comments that I’m wrong without giving an opinion backed by demonstrable fact, I won’t back down, and the best they will receive from me is indifference.

I do what I do because of integrity; there isn’t much of it around, so check out sites carefully, and constantly revisit the ones that have some of that difficult-to-find substance.

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