How we review
The method, the sources, and an explicit account of the limits of what a small publisher can honestly claim to know.
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What this site does, and what it does not
We are a small publisher, not a testing laboratory. We do not operate a malware corpus, we do not run controlled detection benchmarks, and we do not have a hardware bench for performance measurement. Saying so plainly is the point of this page, because a great deal of affiliate publishing in this category implies laboratory work that never happened.
What we do instead is research and synthesis: reading vendor documentation and contractual terms, reading the published results of organisations that do run controlled tests, reading the applicable EU consumer law, and writing it up in language a non-specialist can act on.
How we classify a claim
Every factual statement in an article falls into one of four buckets, and we try to make the bucket visible in the sentence:
| Bucket | Basis | How we phrase it |
|---|---|---|
| Verified fact | Documented by a primary source we name. | Stated directly, with the source linked. |
| Vendor claim | Asserted by the seller, not independently confirmed. | “The vendor states…” — never repeated as our own finding. |
| Our opinion | A judgement, reasoned but not measured. | “In our view…”, with the reasoning shown. |
| Unknown | We could not establish it. | We say we could not establish it, or we leave it out. We do not fill the gap. |
Why there are no scores on this site
You will not find a rating out of ten, a five-star badge or a detection percentage in anything we publish about a product. A score implies a measurement. We have not made the measurement, so publishing one would be a fabrication dressed as a summary — and a fabricated score on a page that earns commission is exactly the practice that has made readers distrust this whole genre.
Where a number genuinely matters, we point at the organisation that produced it. For antivirus detection and system impact, that means the independent laboratories: AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives. We have no commercial relationship with either and earn nothing from sending you there.
Why there are no testimonials
We publish no reader stories, no user quotes and no case studies. An earlier version of this site framed its main article as a “reader story”. No reader had submitted anything; the framing existed to borrow the credibility of a testimonial. It has been removed and it will not come back. If we ever publish a quotation from a real person, it will be attributable and they will have consented to it.
Keeping pages current
Prices, plan names, device limits and feature sets change without notice. Every page carries a last-reviewed date so you can judge how stale it might be, and every commercial page states that the vendor’s own current information prevails over ours where the two diverge. When we revise an article materially, we say what changed rather than editing silently — the main article carries a visible table of the claims we removed and why.
Independence from the advertiser
We are paid on commission when a reader subscribes through a partner link. That is a real incentive and we are not going to pretend it is not. The safeguards we apply against it are structural rather than aspirational:
- No partner sees, approves or edits an article before publication, or afterwards.
- No partner has any right of review over wording, ordering or conclusions.
- Negative findings stay in. The main article keeps a section listing claims we deleted, a section explaining that the operating system already provides protection for free, and a section on who should not buy.
- No countdown timers, no artificial scarcity, no invented deadlines.
- Every commercial link is labelled “partner link” at the point of the click, not only in a footer.
The fuller statement, including what we refuse to do, is in the editorial policy.