Review by Dougie Fresh

I’ve been trying to use this suite of applications for a while now, comparing it to my favorite suite, Roxio Creator, and I haven’t had much luck. I think the problem is I am looking for features that the application just doesn’t have? It’s also not very stable and I can tell you that it’s not my system. I built my system myself and it’s fully loaded with a Phenom II triple-core processor, 4GB of RAM, Windows 7 and all the bell and whistles lovingly maintained by myself. Yet, this hangs/crashes most of the time I try to use it.

First, starting with the photo suite. I had a really hard time figuring out how to get my photos imported into this program. Why can’t it just use the Windows 7 libraries I’d already set up? Same for videos? I didn’t find there was a whole lot I could do with the photos once I got them up and running (after several crashes – maybe it doesn’t like they are all on my home server on the network?). Microsoft Live Essentials is free and it works much better and I can do a lot more with it.

Second, starting with the video suite. I never really got this working. It just kept crashing trying to load in movies. I can load in the same movies into Roxio and Windows Movie Maker. I had to give up. I really wanted to test the editing features here.

Third, DVD/CD burning. I wanted to burn an ISO to a DVD so I could install Ubuntu on a new system. I never found the option for doing so. Is there one? I had to use Roxio instead. I never got around to trying to take some home movies and make a DVD out of it. Again, crashing/hanging.

Finally, WinDVD. I’d heard all kind of good things about WinDVD, especially the Bluray support. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work with Bluray? Maybe it does and I haven’t figured it out? Nothing seems to be intuitive here or it’s so simple the features just don’t exist? Windows Media Center comes with Windows 7 and it can play DVDs.

So, now it’s been installed for quite a while on my PC and I never use it. I always go to Microsoft Live Essentials or Roxio Creator for what I need. Eventually I will get around to installing it.

I’ve been agonizing over writing this review for a long time but this has been my experience. It seems others have found what they are looking for/expecting but I have not. I found the functionality limiting and it crashed/hung a lot on my PC.