PC Mechanic started as a hobby site for David Risley, the site’s founder. After reading an article in Yahoo Internet Life! (currently no longer in print) on making a 20-minute web page, David decided to play his hand in creating his own website. Taking the usual baby steps of any beginning webmaster, after a while he found himself fooling around with simplistic web pages. The first sites had no purpose at all and were rife with all of the web’s classic foopahs: animated GIFs, blink tags and pet pictures. So, to come up with a site that actually had a purpose, David blended two hobbies together: website design and PCs. Thus, PC Mechanic was born.

PC Mechanic actually started at SiliconValley/Lakes/3553 on GeoCities (way before Geocities was bought out by Yahoo). While on GeoCities, the site received routine makeovers and a lot of new content. The traffic level increased steadily to the point of getting a few thousand hits per day. At this point, David realized that people could place ads on a site like this. Geocities was for non-commercial sites only, so it was decided to move to a better server and purchase a real domain. David then opened an account with a shared hosting plan on Pair Networks. Why Pair Networks? Because Anand Lal Shimpi (www.anandtech.com) told David in an ICQ chat that he made the move to Pair and had good luck with them (Anand has since moved beyond Pair Networks). David also purchased the domain of pcmech.com.

After moving the site to Pair Networks (where it is currently still hosted), traffic continued to increase. No longer having the limits of a free hosting service, David was free to do new things with the site including setting up user forums as well as exploring the commercial aspects of a site such as this. All of the content was still being written by David personally. He soon realized that he could not be the only one to author content for this site. He met M. A. Dockter in the forum. He posted an article in the forum on Windows Bashers. David like his witty style and contacted him about posting the article on the main site. That article was the first to be published on the website that was not written by David. Later, when David was oficially looking for staff, Dockter emailed with interest. As more writers were brought on board, Dockter became the first editor-in-chief of the website (other than David, of course).

In April of 2000, David incorporated the business as PC Media, Inc. In July of the same year, PC Media went through negotiations with eFront Media to sell the website to them. eFront was an up-and-coming network during the dot-com boom which had the strategy of buying established websites using cash and stock options, then hosting their advertising on the site to earn a profit. The contract was signed and they took official ownership of PC Mechanic. As the tech bubble burst, eFront began to go the route of other dot-bombs. The site was hosted on eFront’s server, although PC Media stil maintained an active account at Pair Networks. As it became more apparent that eFront was a sinking ship, David moved the site back to Pair Networks and formally withdrew from the contract with eFront citing breach. PC Media wrestled the domain name back from eFront Media a month later. Once again, full control was under the umbrella of PC Media, Inc.

PC Mechanic survived the tech bubble burst and expanded to where it is today. M.A. Dockter has moved on. The site now hosts a mailing list of over 40,000 to which it sends a weekly newsletter and tip of the day. Our forums continue to grow. We have several active authors posting fresh content weekly. PC Mechanic is still hosted with Pair Networks, although we are no longer on a small, shared hosting plan due to the demands of such a large website. We have been recognized in several major magazines and newspapers as a premiere source for information on how to fix, repair or build a personal computer.