PC World's 30 Most Popular Stories of 2007

Twelve months. Thousands of articles, slide shows, videos, downloads, and more. Millions of visitors perusing billions of words and images. There's a surging sea of content on PCWorld.com, and over the course of a year, all of it gets read--but only a few items qualify as true smash hits.

Herewith, our megablockbusters for 2007, from practical advice to pure entertainment.

1. The Strangest Sights in Google Earth: A digital travelogue? On PCWorld.com? We'd never done one before, but when Senior Reporter Tom Spring told us that you can spot elephants, crop circles, and corporate logos in Google's mapping program, it sounded like a lot of fun. What we didn't know was that Tom's slide show would go on to be the single most-read feature ever on PCWorld.com.

2. The 20 Worst Windows Features of All Time: Fact one: The vast majority of PC World readers use Microsoft's operating system. Fact two: Virtually none of them love it unconditionally. Those two truths inspired us to compile this illustrated history of two decades of Windows nuisances, from the mild (Windows Movie Maker) to the monstrous (Messenger Service, which let hackers reboot your PC by remote control). 

3. The 10 Worst PCs of All Time: Some of them were surprisingly popular, like the VIC-20. Others made no mark in the computing universe, like the New Internet Computer. But these ten machines had one thing in common: In one way or another--usually in multiple ways--they gave the PC a bad name.

4. The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time: Talk about an article that just won't say die--we published Dan Tynan's list of losers back in May 2006, and it has remained wildly popular ever since. 

5. The 100 Best Products of 2007: Once again, we decided to rank the 100 best products of the year, gathering winners from an array of categories. Once again, we did it midyear, for reasons too complicated to explain. Once again, we named the Product of the Year (it's an office suite, and it doesn't hail from Redmond). And once again, the story was a monster hit.

6. The Most Notable Notebooks of 2007: We thought people would like this slide-show retrospective of the most interesting laptops we'd tested as of September, and they did. But we never guessed that one factoid--that the MacBook Pro ran Vista faster than any other machine we'd benchmarked at the time--would inspire an Apple TV commercial.

7. The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time: Okay, by "all time" we meant "since the dawn of the PC revolution." (If we hadn't set limits, we would have needed to consider the bicycle, the ball-peen hammer, and fire.) Our choices led off with the browser that was once synonymous with the World Wide Web. (Meanwhile, we asked readers to vote on our picks, and iD Software's Doom was a runaway winner as the best tech product ever.)

8. Laptop reviews: If you could visit the PC World Test Center, you'd see a bevy of notebooks undergoing objective testing with our WorldBench benchmark and other methodologies. That's because thousands of people come to PCWorld.com every day for advice on which portables to purchase. 

9. 101 Fantastic Freebies: Back in the 1990s, our cover stories on the year's best stuff were top sellers at newsstands everywhere. Actually, they still are--and today, our annual freebie roundup is also a smash online.

10. The 20 Most Annoying Tech Products: We asked readers to vote on the products that had irritated them the most over the years. The top vote-getter was an object that was round, silver, and free--and for a while in the 1990s, it seemed prone to Tribble-like multiplication.