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  Explorer 9

It's instinctive to follow a friend's or colleague's advice when buying a new piece of IT equipment. If they say, "Company X was fabulous when I had a problem" you'll pick up the credit card; if their response involves bargepoles and no touching, then you'll think twice.

In many ways, the PC Pro Reliability and Service Awards are just an extension of this. But rather than relying on one person's advice, we've gathered the informed opinions of 15,000 readers so that you can buy with absolute confidence.

We're now into the Awards' second decade of life, and this year sees a new innovation: all the results are online. As such, I encourage you to bookmark this site and keep referring to it whenever you're on the point of making a buying decision. Feel free to share the secret with friends and colleagues too!

How we determine the results

It takes a long time to obtain results as in-depth and informative as those we publish here. Not only the three months during which we run the survey, but the time each individual has taken to give us their feedback.

With 13 different categories to vote in and at least five questions in each category, it's a demanding process.

We first ask which items people had bought for home and business use in the past two years, so if they had only bought a printer, digital camera and laptop then those were the only categories they had to fill in. And if they'd bought a second printer, camera or laptop, they could give us feedback on those as well.

As an example, consider digital cameras. First, we ask which brand of camera you bought. Then, on a scale from very satisfied to very dissatisfied, we ask you to rate the image quality, reliability and value for money of the camera. Then, arguably the most important question of all, we ask "would you buy the same brand of camera again?".

We convert these answers into numeric values. Very satisfied was ten points, satisfied eight points, neither dissatisfied or satisfied five points, dissatisfied two points, and very dissatisfied zero points (in the case of buying again, Yes equals ten points, No equals zero points). Dividing by the number of "votes" we received for each company, we then obtained an average figure out of ten.

These figures are the basis of the simple star ratings we provide to give an at-a-glance guide to customer service, reliability and satisfaction.

Editorial awards

To decide the nominations for the Real World Business, Technology Innovator and Environmental Innovator awards, we invited companies to submit a document explaining why they were deserving of the award. Plus, we asked PC Pro's team of contributing editors and staff members to submit their nominations.

To decide who won the Environmental Innovator award, we joined forces with SustainIT (a charity set up to promote the role of ICT and deliver social, economic and environmental benefits) to decide the winner. For the Real World Business award, the decision was down to PC Pro's contributing editors: people who advise businesses on strategy and purchases as part of their working life. And for the Technology Innovator, we open up the voting to the whole of PC Pro's team, including the contributing editors.

The Hardware of the Year is again decided by PC Pro's editorial staff: it's essentially the most desirable kit that's passed through our hands during the year. The Software of the Year is a little different: we drew up a list as an editorial team, but we opened the final vote to the 15,000 people who took part in our survey.

The Labs Award is given to the company with the most consistent scores across all of its appearances in PC Pro in the past 12 months – and we also factor in the number of awards it won per appearance.

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