System Requirements Lab product reviews

This site is just what i had been looking for. For ages every time a new game came out or was even announced I had been frantically trying to find out what the system requirements were and whether my PC would run it, or whether it would be consigned to the 'wait until I can afford a better PC' category. My wait is now finally over.

Using this site couldn't be easier, just go to the home page, choose a game from the drop-down box, click on the Can I Run It button and your away laughing, although be aware the first time this is run it will require the installation of an ActiveX control, this is perfect safe to do.

This ActiveX control will run in both IE & Firefox that I am aware of, so I expect it should go fine in Netscape & Opera as well.

The results screen is nicely laid out and very easy to read, first up you are shown how your PC stacks up to the games minimum requirements, from here it's just a matter of clicking on the Recommended tab to see how your PC stacks up against the games recommened requirements. If your PC fails in any particular area such as Video Card for example it will also give you a handy little 'We Reccomend' button you can click on to see that they recommend, now this takes you to an online US based e-tailer but it's recommendations are good, so it's just a matter of looking up the same spec component on your favourite NZ based e-tailer or better yet check it out on www.pricespy.co.nz to find the best price locally.

So the only thing left to do was to put it through it paces, firstly by testing it against some games I had already played and others I had tried to play on my PC. It was spot on with all of them. So the next step was to test it with a game I have yet to try (Doom 3), and lo and behold it said it would work fine, so off I went and borrowed it from a friend (yes this was done legitimately, we do not condone software piracy of any kind here), and gave it a whirl and it worked to a treat, so next up I thought i'd check out some of the newer games that have just or ar about to be released. First up was Quake 4, which to my dismay will only run at minimum spec. So I thought i'd give Civilisation 4 a go and see how massively overpowered my PC is for this game. Imagine my horror when I found out my Graphics Card wasn't up to spec for this one! Now that was a shocker.

All in all this is a higly valuable site and is now firmly loaded into my browsers bookmarks.