CTS hits its final deadline.(editorial)

There are plenty of reasons to be cheerful around this time of the year, with PC-hungry consumers looking for the hottest gaming desktops, beers flowing freely at parties and personally my wife is due to give birth to our first child, indeed Christmas 2005 should be one to remember, at least in my household.

However, on a less positive note, it gives me great sadness to confirm that this will be the last edition of CTS, as the magazine ceases publication due to tough trading conditions, which have reduced marketing spend. The CTS brand will continue as a new section in sister publication MicroScope, aimed at the system builder sector.

Working with many of you has been a pleasure and I feel we have achieved a great deal, delivering strong market news, in-depth features, analysis and opinion pieces dedicated to the system builder market but with an extra cutting edge.

There also has to be a special mention about the awards, which over the past four years have grown to become the biggest event aimed solely at the PC builder sector. Meeting many of you in varying degrees of inebriation was always good fun ... on the whole. I am delighted to announce that they will continue and we hope you can join us to recognise supplier excellence during the CT show in May. We will be bringing you more details of the awards in MicroScope early in the New Year.

This has been a tough market to cover and on the surface appears to be one in meltdown, so toning negative news with genuine success stories has been an interesting process. There are many companies that are moving in the right direction and look to have a bright future.

However, there are as many that have been caught short by developments over the past five years and I doubt if they will be here in the next half a decade.

Analysts have predicted ...