Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This shredder is great if you figure out the right technique. As you can see by the reviews, there is wide variation in the success with this shredder. I think the difference is that if you use flat paper - i.e. out of your printer with no folds - it seems to work fine. But if you are trying to shred bills or statements that came in the mail, the paper has folds in it that make it harder for the rollers to grab the paper and pull it down into the shredder, and it just spins its wheels, unless you use this trick. HERE'S THE TRICK: Take your stack of paper, fold it in half, and crease the paper at the fold and then put the stack in the shredder with the crease pointing down (like a flattened out V) - the shredder will then grab sheets properly almost every time. The paper still sits more or less flat in the tray, but because the center of the paper has the crease, it dips down into the space between the rollers better so they can grab it. It seems to help if you put a really good crease in the bottom sheet to get things going. Some other notes: * You'll have to manually feed any paper that's odd sized, like those annoying checks your credit card company sends you. Although I did have better success with odd-sized stack and shred if I put all of the same kind in a clean stack and used the fold technique described above - the transfer checks from BofA worked okay this way. * Redistribute the shredded paper occasionally (every 40 sheets or so) because it stacks up towards the back of the unit * Clean the rollers occasionally by wiping them with a clean cloth to get paper shreds and dust off of them * If you shred more over 130-150 sheets, it may stop and and show the red overheat light. Just open the unit up, take out any paper, and wait 5-10 minutes for it to cool off. Note that the red light won't be on when you have the lid open - dumb. * If it does jam, and you reverse it, don't forget to put it back in the auto mode. A couple times I thought it wasn't working because it was running, but it was actually still in reverse mode and of course not shredding! Oops! Following this approach, I was able to shred a whole stack of paper we'd built up because our old shredder required manual feeding. It was maybe 500 sheets in one evening. So I recommend this shredder, but Swingline did a bad job of writing the manual and explaining how to have better success with it.