Notebook Review and Forums closing 1/31/2022

stinger608

Supreme [H]ardness
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This is pretty sad news for anyone that relies on using a laptop as their daily driver:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/all-technologyguide-forums-will-close-jan-31-2022.837524/

It will be sad if they do not archive all the forum posts. Many tech savvy people go to Notebook Review forums for help and information on laptops and it will be a shame to have all this information lost in the wild.

I, still to this day, have an ole Gateway P-7811FX. When it came time, several years ago, to upgrade that laptop, that was the place I went.

It would be great if someone finds a way to archive all these forums and have them readily available to anyone needing information on his or her laptop.
 
Got the email a few hours ago :cry: I really hope there's an archive plan too, there is a lot of information on that forum that is not publicly available anywhere else. Every one of my recent laptops has benefited from something that I could only find on Notebookreview forums- an obscure driver download, a modded BIOS, firmware unlocking instructions, unofficial compatibility lists, list goes on and on. I know that forum hasn't gotten much traffic lately but it'll be a loss.
 
This is a real shame. I just recently got a Dell M6800 and despite it's age the thing is built like a tank and is a real pleasure to use. The thread about the M6800 over on Notebookreview is 146 pages long, and was a great read that gave me a lot of good info. It sucks to see that resource vanish.
 
Another one bites the dust.

I never used that site, but it is indeed a shame when good content is lost.

Everything is being pushed onto YouTube these days because that's where the ad revenue is, but YouTube and video in general is a horrible format for tech reviews, and YouTube comments are no substitute for a web forum.

The internet just continues to go to shit.
 
Oh man, thats a shame. I heavily relied on that website when in college and grad school, since I used a laptop back then instead of a desktop. Their reviews and guides were very helpful in finding the best value machine that fit my requirements.
As some of you have already noted, their forums were a great resource for obscure problems that provided solutions not found elsewhere.

This sucks. Niche forums are dropping while garbage websites like Facebook and their groups continue to grow. I find online groups to be a horrible resource compared to forums.
 
Sadly, this has become quite common. I've on occasion returned to similar tech-related sites after an extended absence only to find them replaced by trashy content mills and SEO blogspam, with every page just another "best [whatever] of [year]" titled heap of garbage. In some of those cases there might have been community members interested in maintaining the service had they been made aware of the situation before its closure or transfer.

From the announcement link given in the OP:
Unfortunately I was not able to secure rights to buy the forums or anything so it will be truly gone.
That was from original post of a long thread, but who knows? Maybe that will change...

I think it's time to divide the Internet in half. The sane people get one half, and the crazies can have the other. (No personal bias regarding the classification of either side, naturally.;))
https://web.archive.org/web/*/forum.notebookreview.com

Tapped info a few random threads and they work…. Not saying that it has everything.
I'm glad you mentioned that. The Internet Archive (donation link) is an important project. I looked at its index of the forum yesterday when I saw this thread, but I'm not sure how well the Wayback Machine handles web forums. It has some of the content in its archive for sure. The parent site, on the other hand, I'd expect to be complete.

Edit: Enjoy some old classic games in your web browser: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games (I haven't tried any of them yet myself)
 
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This is pretty sad news for anyone that relies on using a laptop as their daily driver:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/all-technologyguide-forums-will-close-jan-31-2022.837524/

It will be sad if they do not archive all the forum posts. Many tech savvy people go to Notebook Review forums for help and information on laptops and it will be a shame to have all this information lost in the wild.

I, still to this day, have an ole Gateway P-7811FX. When it came time, several years ago, to upgrade that laptop, that was the place I went.

It would be great if someone finds a way to archive all these forums and have them readily available to anyone needing information on his or her laptop.
Sad to see them go, like here, been on that forum since 2008. Such a sad thing to see all that useful information to go away.
 
Wow, counted on tons of reviews from that site. I remember a great user base on the forums, many laptop issues and mods are model specific so tons of info hidden in the forums. I didn't realize they were in trouble.
 
Huh, I had completely forgotten about it, but I actually had an account over there from back when I did a DIY Vidock (eGPU) back in 2010.

I had forgotten all about that.

Reading over some of the old posts, it was a really good resource, and it is a shame it is going away.
 
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In all the excitement of creating endless data, humans never thought about what would happen to that data. Now the digital world has been around long enough that we are seeing the death of data. Very sad.

Hopefully someone else will take care of the problem.
 
This is a real shame. I just recently got a Dell M6800 and despite it's age the thing is built like a tank and is a real pleasure to use.
I just had to quote this because 110% agree. Those things were absolute monsters, and the new 77## and 75## lines haven't held a candle to them since. Especially since the removal of the e-port! Dear God the TB and WD gen docks of the last 4+ years just plain suck on top of it, our engineers haven't gotten the same experience since.

I'm seriously disappointed to hear they're closing up shop. Before Corp came in and dictated what we bought (surprise! they force us to buy crud), I'd browse NBR all the time, especially after our Dell quarterly updates.

Like everyone else has already stated, I'll never watch a God damn video review of a technical product. I'm a younger guy still (realitively :D), but H and many others just prove a technical read is always better. Give me those graphs, benchmarks and technical discussions to READ.
 
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Not just tech, but niche communities of all sorts have been dwindling over the years. The user base of these sites left for the handful of big social media platforms. Variety is the spice of life, and the internet has become quite bland since it came to be ruled by a few dozen mega-websites.

I used to make a good living designing themes for forum packages like vBulletin and Xenforo back in the heyday of those software platforms. I still have a list of all my clients going back two decades, and all but a couple are now full of tumbleweeds or gone completely.
 
Shame. This was my go-to for laptop reviews for, well... forever. Apart from Notebookcheck and a few macbook-focused sites, they were the only folks to go into any real depth in reviews.

Did many, many trades in their FS/FT. It was the place to go to buy/sell high-end laptops. Bought my first pre-Dell Alienware there.
 
There has to be a way for them to at least back up the forum to external media before the shutdown if they can't find someone to hand the keys over to before the closure. That way they can at least revive the forum later under a different name if need be should someone be able to bring it back up.
 
That sucks! I bought my first laptop from a guy on that site. A Dell XPS M170 with a Geforce 6800ultra. It still had warranty and I bitched to dell enough about over heating that they sent me a m1710 with a 7800 ultra in it. Was my primary gaming machine for a year and a half. World of warcraft in the recliner... those were the days.
Used to research every laptop I bought there. Haven't been in a while, but it will be missed.
 
There has to be a way for them to at least back up the forum to external media before the shutdown if they can't find someone to hand the keys over to before the closure. That way they can at least revive the forum later under a different name if need be should someone be able to bring it back up.
Nope, no mods have access to admin functions per the closing thread, and the owners aren't giving it :(.
 
There has to be a way for them to at least back up the forum to external media before the shutdown if they can't find someone to hand the keys over to before the closure. That way they can at least revive the forum later under a different name if need be should someone be able to bring it back up.
Sometimes you just are done with something and want to move on. Sucks but i can understand too. And the way google can be sometimes old info is hard to find even if it is the answer to your searched question.
 
This is a real shame. I just recently got a Dell M6800 and despite it's age the thing is built like a tank and is a real pleasure to use. The thread about the M6800 over on Notebookreview is 146 pages long, and was a great read that gave me a lot of good info. It sucks to see that resource vanish.

Wait, Dell created a machine that's built like a tank? Normally they're built like a Ford Pinto going full speed into a wall.
 
We were lucky that this place kept the forums going, these type of places just don't seem to work with the younger crowd.
 
Can someone explain to me how a website has to shut down? Why wouldn't they just sell it instead of closing the site entirely? Traffic is worth money.
Traffic is only worth money if it's in volume and sufficiently monetized, otherwise it just costs money. Notebook Review hasn't been reviewing notebooks in awhile so they won't exactly be driving massive ad clicks.
 
Oh man. I used that site a TON when shopping for my current laptop, and when trying to get it set up the way I wanted it. It's a great resource.
Mine too. I needed information and resource they had was very helpful to form an opinion. It would be welcome to have this kind of indepth guidance for notebooks, laptops and tablets on this website.
 
Sadly, this has become quite common. I've on occasion returned to similar tech-related sites after an extended absence only to find them replaced by trashy content mills and SEO blogspam, with every page just another "best [whatever] of [year]" titled heap of garbage. In some of those cases there might have been community members interested in maintaining the service had they been made aware of the situation before its closure or transfer.

From the announcement link given in the OP:

That was from original post of a long thread, but who knows? Maybe that will change...

I think it's time to divide the Internet in half. The sane people get one half, and the crazies can have the other. (No personal bias regarding the classification of either side, naturally.;))

I'm glad you mentioned that. The Internet Archive (donation link) is an important project. I looked at its index of the forum yesterday when I saw this thread, but I'm not sure how well the Wayback Machine handles web forums. It has some of the content in its archive for sure. The parent site, on the other hand, I'd expect to be complete.

Edit: Enjoy some old classic games in your web browser: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games (I haven't tried any of them yet myself)

The main problem with the wayback machine is that while you can look for something if you know it's there; it's content isn't exposed via Google making it massively less visible to the broader public.
 
The main problem with the wayback machine is that while you can look for something if you know it's there; it's content isn't exposed via Google making it massively less visible to the broader public.
Yes, I agree, at least in its current form. I generally only find it useful to reference a specific URL, and most people are probably unaware of IA's existence. I trimmed the following (unfinished paragraph) from my original post for the sake brevity, which expresses a similar concern about the discoverability of content (recovered from a duplicated browser tab I had left open):

Back in the 1980s before the Web, we had Usenet. One could find messages dating back to the late 80s with relative ease through Google Groups. I doubt it will surprise anyone to learn that Google has proved to be a lousy custodian of our digital history. The content still exists in various places, but it's not very useful unless it's also accessible in a meaningful way. The biggest challenge is going to be figuring out how organize all of this information. That was the early promise of [certain] search engines, but we can see how well that turned out. [...] There's also the question of what should not be preserved, part of which is ethical. We never prepared to have the entirety of our lives published globally and recorded for eternity.
 
Wait, Dell created a machine that's built like a tank? Normally they're built like a Ford Pinto going full speed into a wall.

This wasn't a "normal" Dell laptop, it was a high-end $4000 business/workstation laptop. All aluminum/magnesium chassis. Space for up to 4 hard drives (pretty crazy for a laptop). 17.3" screen, 240w power brick. Full keyboard with numberpad. Discrete GPU (quadro, but works fine for games). Heavy enough that you could use it outside during a wind storm.

I deal with people bringing me their old consumer laptops all the time to repair them or get the data off. It's amazing how little abuse a $300 Acer can take before the screen cracks or the entire thing snaps apart like a twig. These dells on the other hand really are built like a brick. Dell certainly does make low-end laptops also, but this wasn't one of them. I like laptops that I can get a decade out of.
 
I just had to quote this because 110% agree. Those things were absolute monsters, and the new 77## and 75## lines haven't held a candle to them since. Especially since the removal of the e-port! Dear God the TB and WD gen docks of the last 4+ years just plain suck on top of it, our engineers haven't gotten the same experience since.

I'm seriously disappointed to hear they're closing up shop. Before Corp came in and dictated what we bought (surprise! they force us to buy crud), I'd browse NBR all the time, especially after our Dell quarterly updates.

Like everyone else has already stated, I'll never watch a God damn video review of a technical product. I'm a younger guy still (realitively :D), but H and many others just prove a technical read is always better. Give me those graphs, benchmarks and technical discussions to READ.
I think the biggest issue with moving the content to a streaming video platform has been the amount of time spent shilling for advertisers (I get it, it's how you make a living) or carrying on about some random nonsense versus the amount of time actually providing useful information. They might spend 30 seconds on a product plug, then show the graph of information that I came to see for a fraction of a second. If I don't pause the video at just the right moment, I've missed my opportunity to absorb the information being presented.

Back to standing on my porch yelling at the clouds to get off my lawn...
 
I think the biggest issue with moving the content to a streaming video platform has been the amount of time spent shilling for advertisers (I get it, it's how you make a living) or carrying on about some random nonsense versus the amount of time actually providing useful information. They might spend 30 seconds on a product plug, then show the graph of information that I came to see for a fraction of a second. If I don't pause the video at just the right moment, I've missed my opportunity to absorb the information being presented.

Back to standing on my porch yelling at the clouds to get off my lawn...
Quibble. That's the second biggest problem. The #1 problem is that 99.9% of the time you can't Ctrl-F to search within a video the way you can with a text article; or do a high speed skim of the text at 5-20x your normal reading speed if you don't have well defined keywords but would know a good result if you saw it.
 
Wait, Dell created a machine that's built like a tank? Normally they're built like a Ford Pinto going full speed into a wall.
If you're buying the business and/or engineering machines, you're going to get that tank. Standard consumer grade, not so much. This is true for all of the manufacturers (except Apple-they don't really do the different grade thing)
 
I thought I'd pass along some information in case it might be of interest, but keep in mind that I'm not a member of the NotebookReview (NBR) forums; please visit the links below and the one from the OP for the details.

Members from the NBR community are in the process of creating "a static, read-only archive of the NotebookReview forum", and they've already made a lot of progress. You can also request an offline copy of the archive, which will be made available once the contents are no longer receiving updates. For more information please see this topic:
https://efgxt.net/topic/104-notebook-review-forum-archive-–-nbrchive/

The site https://efgxt.net/ is a work-in-progress attempt to create a new home for users of the NBR forums. It's already up and running and you can sign up now, but note that the current domain name is only temporary. There are a couple (more?) new sites competing for current NBR members; efgxt.net is not the only one. As NBR will be officially closing tomorrow, I'd encourage anyone who's an active member to check the original forum for updates before that time. Consider also the issue of username availability: if you have a username that you want to keep, it may be a good idea to sign up sooner rather than later at one or more of the alternative sites.

There's a possibility that some notebook enthusiasts in search of a new home will find their way to [H]ardForum, so we should all be on our best behavior. It may be too late to organize a formal welcoming party though. 💻 🥳📔

See also: https://efgxt.net/topic/111-its-time-to-clear-the-air-first-orders-of-business/
 
I loved that site back when a laptop was my daily driver. Their mobile GPU database is insane,

Why couldn’t the dude who wanted to purchase the rights to it just get the staff and move to a new domain and provider announcing it there?
 
Another one of the reasons I have never sold to these POS "community" companies over the years. They don't give a shit about the members or the content. They only give a damn about turning the content the members produce into revenue. Once that window closes, shut it down.
 
Hi All
Sad news. Seems to a be trend now. Tech Websites that provide good information leaving. It's unfortunate.
 
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