When you want to go beyond quick books the sage pro is a good next stepnnProsn-easy set upn-easy to learn and usen-good for small firmsnnConsn-no audit trail

Microsoft MapPoint is good for two types of users: those who need a ‘super’ GPS, and those who need to create maps to go with their presentations and analysis. With a GPS puck (not included), MS MapPoint becomes a great GPS for salesmen, delivery men, and others who need to map out their day in order to visit several points in an efficient manner. Most GPS devices fail in this regard (they work great from point A to B, and could include a detour, but forget about going to ten locations).

I don’t push anti-virus software to its limits. My needs are pretty basic: protect the computer/network (as well as my colleagues to whom I sent emails and documents), and not be intrusive in my work. I use it on one home setup-desktop, netbook. Installation was easy, updates are seamlessly delivered. I can’ stand anti-virus software that shows itself off whenever possible, bragging about how well protected I am. I just want it to work.

Corals latest photo editing software isn’t photoshop, but for the casual user like me it is ideal to to photo editing and correction, especially in batches. For instance I went to a wolf preserve, and all the photos were under exposed with incorrect while balance. Corel let me change to brightness and white balance on 300 photos in just a minute. Easier to use than Lightroom as well, and works on my 4 year old pc

Paintshop has been updated to a newer version. There is no need to purchase this version as the newer version contains many fixes and updates (as well as the latest drivers).

Simple review: if you like Quicken, you’ll be satisfied with this update. I have only used it for a few days, but so far the installation and transition have been seamless.

There are better utilities out there that perhaps don’t promise as much (Norton) but do deliver on their promises. Cons:nn-Lengthy installationn-machine crashes increase after installingn-major headache to removennThree days on luckily a secondary machine with Fix-It that I can never recover…

You’ve heard of employees losing a laptop with 100,000 clients’ credit card information, or 500,000 social security numbers? We don’t want to be one of those companies. We work in Russia, US, England, and elsewhere, and can’t afford to put clients’ information at risk of a public breach. That’s why we use McAfee Anti-Theft

I’ve just set up the Sage 50 accounting system, and it was quite easy (have set up Sage several years ago). Pros:n-Easy set upn-Can handle large or little accounting needsnnCons:n-Pricey, but worth it if you want to go beyond QuickBooks

I used the Dragon software with some reluctance, as I have been unhappy with Windows 7’s speech recognition (and VERY happy with the voice recognition by, for instance, Google’s mobile app and Vonage’s Visual Voicemail). Dragon’s software has performed far better for me than Windows, and it really excels at recognizing foreign accents. Pros:n-reasonably accuraten-works well with people with strong foreign accents (but they still must annunciate very clearly)nnCons:n-system resource hog especially on a 2gb netbookn-still not as good as systems that work over the internet (like Vonage Visual Voicemail)n-seems to be less reliable on numbers