Anyone who cares at all about personal privacy and basic crime prevention needs to have a shredder these days. Although home shredding may not stop an organized crime ring from stealing your identity, at least you can somewhat deter the teenage kids next door from going through your garbage for a discarded credit card statement and then charging stuff to your account.

With these goals in mind, I went to Office Depot six months ago to buy a shredder. The display there was not helpful in explaining the differences between shredders, and of course there were no salespeople around to speak of. I had a vague idea that Fellowes was a decent brand of shredders, so I basically ended up getting the second-cheapest one of their models for $39.99.

The Fellowes P500 consists of two parts: a shredding strip that mounts on top of what amounts to a small plastic garbage can. The shredder produces parallel strips about one quarter inch (half a centimeter) wide. This type of shred is not as secure as the "crosscut", which produces chips of paper; but crosscut shredders break down more often, and the strip shredder assiduously used is probably enough for most home use. There is a "reverse" setting for the shredding mechanism, which is only useful for attempting to clear jams.

This shredder has two serious design flaws. First, the shredding strip is not securely mounted on top of the garbage can. It does not snap into place or anything like that -- instead, the bar has two sixteenth-inch "feet" that rest on two eighth-inch platforms on each side of the wastepaper basket. A slight jolt will cause one end of the shredding bar to fall into the basket -- highly annoying, especially when you are actually shredding at the time. In addition, it sometimes seems like the sizes or shapes of the two parts are not quite aligned -- for mysterious reasons (heat? humidity? user error? general cussedness?) the two pieces occasionally seem to refuse to fit together at all in any graceful way.

The other major design flaw is that the shredder can realistically only take a single sheet of paper at a time. In no case can it ever handle more than 4 layers of paper together. The problem is that unless the paper is fed in extremely carefully to the shredding slot, any irregularity will be turned into a bunched up or folded segment. So a double-sheet should in theory go through fine, but if it's not fed in perfectly it will end up folded once or twice -- which will result in a small area of 4 or 8 sheet thickness, which will result in a paper jam. The only way to recoup from a paper jam of this sort is to pick out the clotted chunks of paper with tweezers, occasionally setting the shredder to reverse to help things along. There may be some things less fun than this, but on a hot summer day in my non-airconditioned home office (like, for instance, yesterday), it's sure hard to think of any. Expect to take at least half an hour of painstaking work to clear a bad jam. Given how valuable most people's time is these days, buying this shredder hardly seems like a good way to save money in the long run.

The Fellowes P500 shredder is also quite loud and grating, and quite slow compared to better models (partly the shredding takes place slowly, partly you can only send through one page at a time) -- therefore loud and grating for a longer time per quantity of paper shredded. On the plus side, you would have try really hard to find a way to hurt yourself on this thing -- the shredding teeth are buried inside the unit so far that you can't even see them. I would only recommend this unit to a very careful person with modest shredding needs who is in no particular hurry -- a meticulous teenager perhaps. For a normal person with a job, the design flaws of this shredder far offset its low price and safety.

Recommended: No

Purchase Price (if leased, monthly payment): 40
Machine age (Months in use): 6