My experience with this software is fraught with frustration which ultimately led me to uninstall it. It’s doubtful I would ever buy another ROXIO product at this point. In theory, burning DVDs should be relatively easy, after all, the DVD is pretty standard these days, and BY DEFINITION, Apple uses standardized hardware (I’m not starting a flame war, but suffice it to say that there are pros (standardization) and cons (the Apple Tax) to that practice), so Roxio doesn’t need to make their software compliant with every single DVD burner out there, just those that come in Apple machines.

The problem with this software is not that it doesn’t do what it’s intended to do. It mostly does. The issue is that it does it less well than other freeware programs available. I came into contact with the software when my friend called me to help him repair his computer which had developed a whole host of problems after he upgraded from XP to Vista. He needed to fix his boot log, as well as repair some registry entries.

I’ve used turbo tax to prepare my taxes for the last seven years. Not any longer. They’ve substantially changed the way they charge for printing multiple returns, effectively guaranteeing that anyone filing more than 1 return will have to pay substantially more than before. This is not about ‘improvements’ or ‘features.’ It is all about corporate greed. I can completely understand corporations needing to increase prices a reasonable amount each year; that is just good business.

I’ve been using Quicken for about 7 years. Until upgrading to the 2010 version I’d been running Quicken 2007. Upgrading from 07 to 10 was easy and only took a few minutes to convert my data file. All my memorized updates work, so from an ease of upgrade standpoint, they did a great job (at least under my particular circumstances). Stylistically they made a few changes to colors and fonts, which I personally think are an improvement, but that’s preference more than anything.

If you head over to Cnet you’ll see they gave this a program a 10⁄10 review. Their short and overly sweet review doesn’t mention the horrific installation process, the many conflicts with Windows restore, or the bloated, useless feature heavy nature of this software. Professional (paid) reviewers totally loose their credibility when they give a P.O.S. like this a 10⁄10 review. Stay away from this program. It’s horrible. My work dell came pre-loaded with Nero 8, which was bad enough.

PCMover is supposed to make moving your system from one computer to another as painless as possible. Unfortunately it doesn’t work very well. First off the software is confusing to use, even for a tech savvy person. Second, each end of the transfer cable needs to be plugged in to a specific computer but THE CABLE IS NOT MARKED in a way that lets you know which end is which! I wasted an hour trouble shooting before realizing that I needed to swamp the cable around.

I bought this for one reason and one reason only: the hope that iMovie had been fixed from the 2008 version to be more like the 2006 version. Didn’t happen. iMovie is now worse than ever. Editing audio files is probably the most frustrating thing I’ve tried in a while. The interface is not designed well, and I found myself looking for features that used to be there (fade out video effect in conjunction with audio fade out) thinking they’ve got got to be there somewhere, and then finding out that they simply don’t exist.

Unfortunately, a program like PowerDVD is a necessary evil if you want to watch Blue-Rays on your computer. Until Microsoft decides to natively decode blue ray through Windows Media Center (or whatever replaces it in Windows 8), you need a separate piece of software like this one. For reference, I have an HTPC with a dual core 2.4ghz processor, 8gb of ram, and a blue-ray player connected to my plat panel TV.

I’ve never been a fan of Norton products, but unfortunately I have to use them on several computers at work. While I don’t have a formal education in computers, I’ve built several of them from scratch, am an early adopter of things like Vista 64-bit, and spend a lot of time reading about them. Frankly, Norton anti-virus uses so much system resources it should be classified as bloatware, or even malware.

The newest trend in software is to sell you a subscription rather than a piece of software that you own and may use as you like. What’s the difference and why is it important? Allow me to explain:nnA subscription is like a lease. You pay a set amount of money either monthly or for one year and gain access to something (an apartment, a piece of software) and may use it for the agreed upon amount of time.