Great 8-port switch. I’ve owned it for over a year and it remains just warm to the touch. I have several ports at a gig and several at 100FDX. I leave everything at autonegotiate. There were a couple times where I switched off autonegotiate on a port and a particular PC because of an intermittent link outage and I was suspecting a problem with the autonegotiate. But in the end, both times ended up being the same RJ-45 plug at the PC end of the 60 foot CAT-5 cable.

Great 8-port switch. I’ve owned it for over a year and it remains just warm to the touch. I have several ports at a gig and several at 100FDX. I leave everything at autonegotiate. There were a couple times where I switched off autonegotiate on a port and a particular PC because of an intermittent link outage and I was suspecting a problem with the autonegotiate. But in the end, both times ended up being the same RJ-45 plug at the PC end of the 60 foot CAT-5 cable.

I’ve used prior versions of CorelDRAW, most recently (and somewhat obviously) X6. X7 represents a substantial upgrade. I’m running the software on a machine I built that has an AMD FX-8320 processor. That’s an eight-core processor with 64-bit capability that runs at 3.5 ghz. I’ve got it paired with 8gb of low latency Crucial memory. The program resides on an SSD. X7 launches almost instantly, and even with large files, it runs smooth as silk on this setup.

I’ve used Corel’s PaintShop software since the X4 edition. Corel keeps tweaking the software to improve it. This latest iteration offers a pure 64-bit version. The features of the 64-bit version are generally the same as those of the 32-bit version. However, it makes much more effective use of extended memory. I ran this on a machine with an Intel Ivy Bridge i7 processor and 16 gb of DDR3-1866 memory, and it runs like butter even on the largest RAW image files.

I’ve been using Kaspersky products on desktop computers for years and have always been wowed by their strength, stability, and ease of use. I was eager to try out their product for Android. So far, I’m not as impressed with this product. It was a bit trickier to install than the comparable desktop products. It doesn’t bombard me with alerts or cause instability on my Note 3, but it does seem to chew up a fair bit of battery power doing its job scanning messages and apps.

I’ve been using Video Studio Pro for the last three iterations. This easily is the best revision to date. I’m using this on a machine I built with an AMD FX-8320 (eight core) processor with 16 gb of RAM. I’m using Windows 8.1 64-bit. The 64-bit code runs fast on the computer, and it renders video quickly. I’m finding that it will render 1080p video in MP4 format about twice as quick as X6 did.

In the past fifteen years or so, I’ve had experience with Norton, McAfee, ZoneLabs, and Kaspersky anti-virus and security software. Bitdefender ranks right up there among the least problematic security suites I’ve come across. I’ve had McAfee products that brought my computer to its knees and ZoneLabs products that interfered terribly with Internet browsing. I haven’t noticed any glitches so far with Bitdefender 2010. It’s the most transparent suite I’ve used.

I used both VideoStudio x4 and x5 and found them easier to work with (and less error prone) than products I’d used from Roxio and Pinnacle. Corel keeps improving this software, adding more and more functionality and tools that work with today’s HD formats. Now you can implement motion tracking. You just move the pointer to the object you want to track. Pretty simple. You can do stop motion shooting. You can manipulate files recorded in the latest 4K ultra HD standards.

I’ve been using Kaspersky for years. No bugs, good security, and now multiple devices are covered. Great security solution. Highly recommended.

Over the years, I have used any number of photo editing and graphics programs, ranging from Adobe PhotoShop to CorelDraw to PaintShop Pro. However, I’ve never used anything quite like Painter Essentials 5. This program is designed to help you convert your photographs into art. It has a number of tools that will let you paint using your photographs as a jumping off point. It also has filters and algorithms that will automatically convert your photographs into pre-selected styles (e.