With Norton 360, I haven’t had to worry about nasty little bugs infiltrating my PC. It’s easy to use, especially since you can schedule scans, and I haven’t had a problem which leads me to believe it’s doing it’s job. The only downside that I found was having to disable other security software so that Norton 360 would work correctly. Besides that, I like it.

Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 10 is okay for someone who like to tinker with things. It took me a long time to load on my computer after stalling out. Once it was on there, it made my computer slower and I found that most of the features it has, I’m not interested in using.

Get your geeky friend if you’re a novice (like me). Only my friends ended up being a limited amount of YouTube videos because I would have been unable to do some basic things otherwise. Installation didn’t take forever and the manual is like spanish if you don’t know anything about photo editing software. I made the mistake of thinking that my knowledge of Photoshop wold suffice but it doesn’t. However, if you have some level of understanding, I’m sure it’s a great program.

Microsoft Office Accounting Pro 2008 would be a great tool for small business. It’s easy to use and hasn’t caused any burbs on my system like most products I install. I’m just now starting my business so I don’t get a lot of use out of it but it would be great for businesses that have actual employees :)

I will someday abandon all Intuit products but the truth is I’m locked into TurboTax for 2015 per some carryover data. I tried several others but ended up paying the big bucks for TT. It works, filed OK, no problems. I guess I could live with TT if I hadn’t had 10+ years of frustration with Quicken and its forced upgrades for reduced functionality. I’ve successfully abandoned Quicken.

As a long time MS Office user, I was disgusted with their upgrade tactics, used feature-limited Open Office for years, then used Google Docs which has many limitations. I installed WordPerfick Office X7 trial. My first test was to create a chart from a *.CSV file which is a frequent task for my engineering work. The Quattro spreadsheet hung up trying to parse the data. I reformatted the data several different ways to make it easier and could never get it to work.

I’ve been a Quicken user for many years, but am really ticked off at their upgrade policies. The best you’ll get away with is repurchasing Quicken every 3 years if you want to retain the online banking feature. I presently run the 2010 version which works well. I see no reason to upgrade and agree with some other reviewers that Quicken upgrades rarely improve anything or add useful features. However, I now get frequent reminders that if I don’t upgrade by April I’ll lose the online banking feature.

I keep looking for something other than TurboTax every year and am never satisfied with any of the alternatives. I keep buying TurboTax.

Avoid, avoid, avoid! Intuit has Zero customer service and relies on extortion to get users to upgrade. I’ve been a captive Quicken user for many years. I should upgrade to Quickbooks for my new business except it is the same company, Intuit. My last forced upgrade was to 2013. Now that I’m less than a year from another forced upgrade I have to endure a $10 off advertisement for 2015 every single time I open Quicken.

I have felt that Adobe Photoshop is getting stale for a while. I’ve been wanting to try out some other products for my webcomics, but wasn’t sure what to use. The thing about Photoshop is that it’s so geared for photos that it’s really not great for creating art. I got Corel Painter 2015 and jumped right in. Probably not the best thing to do. I just didn’t realize what I was getting myself into.