Good Morning from the Editor

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the first full day’s operation on the road for Tom’s Hardware Guide UK & Ireland. I’ve been told that I should probably take this opportunity to make some grand speech about life, the universe and why you’ll just love what we’ve done with the place. Well, I think life is great, the universe is big and you’ll just love what we’ve done with the place. I mean, just look at that masthead.

Now that that’s out of the way... Tom’s Hardware Guide UK & Ireland. It feels rather odd to be putting that in print after a month or six of hush-hush preparation ; but the time has finally come to make a big splash to the world and announce to you, one of Tom’s Hardware’s half a million readers in the region, that we’re in town.

500,000 people who are used to dealing in pounds and euro is a lot to be sending to the US-focused Tom’s Hardware, and so in its most simplistic form Tom’s Hardware UK & Ireland is a localised version of the US site ; as noted by the fact that I spelled that with an S and not a Z. As much as we and our American cousins may speak a common language, we are still separated by an ocean and a currency.

So, to make up for this we’ll be taking just about everything from Tom’s Hardware and TG Publishing’s network of sites, such as MobilityGuru.com, and anglicising it. First with spelling and then more importantly with local prices and insight. Rather than the $129.99 Disc Shredder we’ll have the £99.88 Disc Shredder, and as time goes by we’ll be offering local price comparisons in our reviews ; something the US site already does, but which is about as useful as a chocolate fireguard to those of us in ye olde world.

Sometimes products reviewed won’t be available in the UK, either locally or without strenuous import, and we’ll either give the coverage a miss ; or publish the article and make a note if it’s part of a major roundup or is just something really fantastic and original that’s worth the strenuous import.

That’s the easy part, and it will be the most notable addition to the content that you receive on a daily basis. We trust that it will save you both time and headaches.

Then, to bridge the gap between our morning and the morning time for our rather excellent news team in the US, we’ll give you as much local news as we can stuff down our socks and sneak past the NDA-enforcing bouncers with.

And as for me...

Do excuse my manners - telling you we’re off on an adventure, and then not bothering to introduce myself as we’re about to plummet off the side of a cliff. I’ve been around Tom’s Hardware for quite a while at this stage, and from fiddling with desktop replacements to writing a column on gaming and getting high on caffeine in the name of a good article I’ve been having fun and writing about it.

From writing business reports to gathering news for The Inquirer (...half the PR people in the room just backed away from their keyboards...) my life pre-Tom’s Hardware fits in well with the niche we’re carving out here. I do hope my experience and writing style will be informative and entertaining to you. If not then you can of course always plaster my inbox with bad feedback.

I see a bright future for Tom’s Hardware UK ; why else would I subject myself to this abuse... ? I see the site becoming considerably more relevant to readers on this side of the pond and my mission in life is to deliver UK-specific content which will make Tom’s Hardware an invaluable resource locally.

Some things of course are going to remain exactly the same, and the rather interesting community we have will not be separated along the lines of geography - for one, there are only so many flames I can scrape off the inside of my inbox for doing otherwise.

The reviews, the previews, the reports... they’ll all be staying mostly the same bar a few more relevant additions, and then we’ll be adding to them with our own brand of local news and reviews. The future is bright, the future is... well, you know, full of sunshine and such.

Well, that seems like enough dribbling for the one morning. Coming up this day we have our Spring Intel Developer Forum coverage in full, a review of the Sony DSC R1 digicam and in the newsletter you can expect to see a review of the Mvix MV-5000U External Storage... err, "yoke" as I shall call it.