Ramon G. McLeod

1. What is the PC World Ratings system?

Implemented in November 2009, our system is based on a 0- to 5-star scale that represents our overall assessment of a product or service's performance, features, and design. It replaces our 100-point-scale system, which had been in place since November 2005.

2. What do the overall rating numbers and word scores mean?

Perfect (5 stars): The product or service is about as good as it gets--innovative, easy to use, and supremely useful. Products of this caliber are rare indeed.

Buying a tech product can be a daunting chore. It's not easy to keep on top of the latest improvements, upgrades, and new features, even for the experts here at PC World. Pity the uninformed buyer who just wants something that works.

Making your buying decisions all the more complicated is the confusing and misleading marketing hype that manufacturers and salespeople push at shoppers. I've fallen for it, just as most folks have, sometimes with disastrous results.

Artwork: Chip TaylorWe've just launched the beta version of our newly revamped PCWorld Downloads section with a variety of new features designed to make it simpler to get the files you want.

Search our massive download library, which includes more than 30,000 files, has been vastly simplied, but the redesign includes many other new features including:

The Nintendo Wii brought gesture control to game play, and it seems very likely that you'll soon be seeing variations on the idea in a lot more consumer products.

Two examples turned up at CES, one very real, the other a bit off in the future: Sony's Z555 gesture phone and JVC's "Snap & Gesture" technology, in which your hand, and just your hand, replaces the remote control for your television set.

Blogs, wikis, and community forums are a new form of business intelligence that can help companies prosper and bloom--or lead them to disaster.

During the Web 2.0 Expo today in San Francisco, Howard Kaushansky, president of the blog analysis company Umbria, said that businesses that ignore what's being said about them are missing out on new opportunities and placing themselves at great risk.

Photograph: Marc SimonEpson has upped the ante for DVD-equipped projectors with its MovieMate 25. The product features excellent image quality, tons of great extras, and an astonishingly low $1199 price tag. The only negative is its substantial 13.4-by-12.2-by-7.1-inch size--bulky for a unit that's designed to sit on a living-room table.

Other than in size, the MovieMate 25 is superior in every way to rival Optoma's impressive MovieTime DV10. The extras start with an 80-inch, floor-standing, pull-up, 16:9 wide screen. A 40-watt subwoofer works with the projector's integrated speakers to produce deep, natural sound.

Photograph: Marc SimonMy inner recycler loves finding new ways to use old tech products, so Wiebetech's TrayDock hot-swappable hard-drive enclosure intrigued me. The product lets you convert any internal IDE or SATA hard drive into an external unit perfect for backups. In my tests the product worked well, although for $170 (sans drive) it isn't the best option for people seeking a basic, inexpensive backup solution.

The aptly named TrayDock is a solidly built, black metal box with a removable tray. The basic bundle comes with either an empty IDE tray or an empty SATA tray (additional trays sell for $50 apiece). Wiebetech also sells the box with a SATA or IDE hard drive (prices start at $250 for a 120GB unit). Because I always seem to have a few hard drives lying around, I opted for a unit with an empty IDE tray.