First, to the people wondering if they can use this to shred newspaper and light cardboard for composting: Yes, it works beautifully. (Read the room, Bonsaii -- you should advertise this function!)Several recommendations for shredding this type of material:1. Determine the grain of the newspaper, ie, which direction you can tear it to get thin, straight strips. Fold your newspaper sections so you are shredding ACROSS the grain. Otherwise you may get strips winding around the shredding mechanism.2. Shred 3-4 sections of newspaper, then alternate with some light cardboard. I find a 12 page section of newspaper is maximum when folded to fit the mouth of the shredder, and no more than a double thickness of cereal box type cardboard.3. Lubricate the gears each time before emptying. Those return-reply envelopes that come in junk mail are perfect -- put cooking oil in and let it coat the inside of the envelope, then shred the envelope. Run it backward and forward a few times to get any bits of paper to fall off.Positive features:1. It is very quiet. You can have a conversation while using it.2. It shreds quickly and has a high capacity bin, so you can run through large jobs quickly.3. There is a cooling fan, though I simply stop the session as soon as the fan comes on, rather than worrying about timing how long I've been using it.4. The outside is attractive in appearanceNegatives:1. The attractive appearance is at the expense of function. On the inside, there are unfinished fins of plastic protruding into the main housing and the storage bin to reinforce them, making it hard to keep clean.2. It creates a lot of static electricity, and that makes the paper shreds fly around inside instead of only dropping straight down into the bin. It also causes them to stick to the plastic bin -- both the inside and the outside. Then the paper shreds randomly reverse polarity and fly off into the room while you're trying to empty the bin. It's particularly a problem when the humidity is low.3. The bin doesn't fully fit into the shredder, because it's designed to accomodate a separate bin for credit cards. (Like, how many cards do they think we need to shred? There's no reason not to just design it so all shreddings go into a single hopper.) It is hard to empty shreddings with the credit card bin attached, it's still hard to empty paper shreddings without it attached, since the shape of the main bin is irregular to accommodate it, and it lets even more paper shreds get outside the main bin if you don't attach it.4. The wheels aren't free-rotating casters. It's not as easly to drag it around as you might think. It really only goes back and forth in one direction.All in all, I've had it nearly a year, and I'm still very happy with it. My shredding is completely under control.I do hope they re-design the plastic parts to smooth off the fins so they can be wiped clean more easily, and to eliminate the credit card shredding bin.