HOW YOU DECIDE THE WINNERS

PC Pro doesn’t decide the winners of the Technology Excellence Awards: you do. Each year, thousands of readers take part in a comprehensive three-month survey. We ask how satisfied you are with the quality of prints, reliability of your broadband, battery life of your laptop – and collate the figures to create the percentage scores you see in the tables.

The maximum score a company can receive is 100%, where a reader declares themselves “very satisfied” with, say, customer support for their desktop PC. If they merely select satisfied, that’s 80%. And so on, until they reach “very dissatisfied”, which is 0%. So a score of 90% could be 30 people saying very satisfied (100%) and 30 satisfied (80%).

Previously, we’ve only published scores where we have feedback from at least 50 buyers of a brand . However, this year we have included scores where between 25 and 50 people have responded. The scores are still representative, but – from a statistical point of view – we can’t have the same level of confidence in the results.

We also use methods to protect against “stuffing” – that is, where a manufacturer may try to bias results by encouraging only positive feedback. As a result, we believe the scores you see are ones you can trust.

From p36, we also select our own products of the year. Chosen by our editors, and those of sister brands Alphr,

Expert Reviews and IT Pro, these are the stand-out products from the hundreds we’ve tested over the past 12 months.