About TweakTown

TweakTown is dedicated to my late grandfather Val Grimm, who first introduced me to computers some 15 years or more ago. The website was officially named and launched to the public on the 15th of September 1999. Originally, TweakTown was known as "Wilmot's Website", which basically serviced as my personal homepage with information about me and links to other websites. TweakTown has now transformed into one of the biggest and most successful tech media websites in the world, being accessed by many tens of thousands of readers every day.

We have been featured in many mainstream press magazines, news papers and many high-profile websites such as Digg, Gizmodo, Engadget, Slashdot and Fark on a regular basis and even on CNN, The Screen Savers and TechTV. Our content is syndicated to thousands of readers through our RSS feeds as well as by Google News, buy.com and others. Presently and in the past TweakTown has provided content for other publications including GigaZone magazine, APC magazine, Atomic magazine, PC Power Play magazine and others.

How did it all start? I had a pretty good understanding of getting better performance out of 56k dial-up modems. So, I decided to publish a modem "tweaking" (fine tuning or optimizing) guide for friends that were crawling along on slow 56k dialup Internet connections, which needed that little extra speed boost in online games to improve their ping (latency response time). In the way the Internet works best, the word quickly got around about how well the famous Modem Tweaking Guide improved performance and Wilmot's Website eventually got bigger and bigger at rapid speed to the point where it eventually adapted into a fully functional tech website, with talented writers and contributors dotted all over the world. Now, we post many daily high quality news, articles, reviews and guides from our long list of contributors and staff based around the world in places such as Australia, Taiwan, United States, United Kingdom and Europe.

Wilmot's Website was hosted by my local ISP of the time. They eventually kicked me off their server for exceeding bandwidth limits. At this stage, I had also released a couple more tweaking guides for my growing audience. This is when I thought about starting up an optimization page and getting rid of other personal stuff, which probably wasn't of much interest to the general public. During the 15th of September 1999, I suddenly came up with the idea of renaming Wilmot's Website to "TweakTown" - please do not ask why, as to date I cannot remember how I came up with the name and why.

In 2004, sometime after TweakTown turned into a full time job for me, a company was registered in Australia called Tweak Town Pty Ltd which helped make things more official. Now many staff are employed full time along with many others who help contribute with website coding, graphics and the forums.

Thanks must go out to many people who have helped TweakTown in the beginning stages - too many to list here but you know who you are! Although, without a doubt, the most important people are you, the loyal readers of TweakTown who help keep us alive!