One-Year Subscription to Consumer Reports $17 at Best Deal Magazines

I subscribe to CR, but I often disagree with them when it comes to electronic items. When they recommended Trend Micro's antivirus, I chuckled. When they recommended Vtech cordless phones, I ran out and bought one, even though I had had only bad experiences with them. Of course, I immediately returned the Vtech for very poor fidelity. So, like getting information from the Internet, don't believe everything you read.

As a long-time and intermittent subscriber, I tend to agree with the above comment. I think that their assessments of computers and some other electronic items is often suboptimal. In evaluating software, they often ignore excellent free programs. In the past, they have refused to do systematic studies of central air conditioners arguing that they are very installation-critical, yet those variables would tend to be negated by large numbers of users'
experiences. I think that their auto owners' surveys have been very good and extremely useful. Their objective auto evaluations alone are probably worth the subscription price for many people. Knowing all this, I never make a major purchase without at least checking their publication. For autos, I never look at anything else.

Agreed. They have not been afraid to blow the whistle when they found danger in certain car models. Strangely, when they NOT-recommended a certain model for safety reasons years ago, it popped up with glowing reviews in another consumer mag (that nobody subscribes to).

I use their reviews as a starting point. I never buy anything they recommend without checking the Amazon reviews first. Often I have found their picks to be duds in the hands of actual consumers.

I agree they are pretty good, but I never can seem to find the appliance models that they test, and just a few numbers off on models can be BIG difference in the Item and quality. IE TV's and Mowers