Consumer Reports is pretty good for household products that they have expertise in. For example, I'd trust their dishwasher or toaster recommendation. However, when they test something that's outside of their sphere of expertise, they can miss the mark by failing to focus on criteria that are known to be important by real experts. For example, from time to time they'll review bicycles. Anyone who really knows about bikes will be amused/exasperated by the aspects of the bikes being tested that they make their judgement on. They've been testing computers for long enough that I'm sure they're not completely clueless, but I think their judgement criteria are based more on a casual computer-as-appliance home user, and a power user might feel that they focus on superficial things.