Becoming a reviewer?

[RobM]

I am interested in becoming a reviewer but written rather than video.

I have always been interested in computing right from the early Sinclair Spectrum days.
When I got my first real PC from Evesham Vale, it was an Athlon machine costing £1500 at the time and was pretty much as good as it could get back then. But that was a lot of years ago.
Since then I have always remained several years behind and my current rig is an A10 system. The only recent part being the RX470 that I was lucky enough to win at Christmas.

I am now almost 54 and had to stop working for health reasons 2 years ago and have to accept that I will likely not be in a position to work again. I am unable to buy gear and have been hoping to win stuff from the many competitions I enter but alas that's only provided me with an awesome gfx card (ty TTL )
I suffer from Gulf War Illness which is a blanket term for a range of crap Google if your interested in learning more on that topic, suffice to say the MOD and government couldn't give a rats arse about us. After 14 years working with HP I landed in the scrapheap with no future and employees won't touch me with a barge pole.
I spend a lot actually most of my waking hours in front of my PC as it keeps me distracted from the darkness of life and thus I can manage to keep going but at some point its going to get to a point my PC will no longer cut it as its already struggling with Arma and warhammer.

So I got thinking that perhaps I could eek out an existence writing PC hardware reviews and improve my PC specs at the same time but have no idea how to go about it.

 

[tinytomlogan]

Well you can drop me a PM - but "improving my PC specs" is not the thing to say for starters because that instantly assumes you're going to keep kit.

If you are a lone ranger even borrowing kit is hard going, if you work for someone then your English needs to be of a very high standard and still be able to make it sound interesting. With no experience or proof of ability you'll probably end up doing a lot of stuff to see if the ability is even there before you even got a USB stick

 

[Digikid]

I have to agree with TTL here. If you want to be a reviewer you have to be about the subject ONLY. If you are in it "just to get free stuff" then you are in for an extremely rude awakening.

Most of the time you have to send back what you review.....or share a review unit between reviewers. You have to work up from the very bottom.

I was a reviewer for a site called Raiden.net before the new owner ran the site into oblivion. I did reviews on fans, thermal paste, and then linux based laptops. It was very hard work and basically then only thing I got was a thank you from the provider and a couple Noctua fans and some IC7 thermal paste.

 

[Wraith]

I can tell you all, I've had the greatest privilege and pleasure of being allowed to stay at TTL towers and to see just what Tom does and I don't mean for like a few hours I'm talking 2 whole weeks. It is just mind blowing the amount of time and effort that goes into what the Guv does and the level of detail he works to it goes beyond OCD, he has a passion for his job which is something I have not seen in a very long time and it's admirable to say the least.

If anyone was to prove their worth, just take a look at past reviews and take notes on the layouts the detail in the Introductions, descriptions, Photos, Conclusions and be 100% on your English. Maybe give user reviews a go, I know I have in the past along with many other forum members.

 

[RobM]

Cheers for the advice guys I wasn't looking for free gear, was looking at a way of funding new gear. I have no idea how it all works hence my original post was to find out whats involved.

Tom I won't PM you just yet I think maybe I should do a review on something I already own and put that in user reviews so will go that route as Wraith suggests.