I have an occasional love and often hateful relationship with Roxio products on PC and Mac. Way back when, Roxio was owned by Adaptec and its utilities were daily necessities when working with SCSI drives (an interface most people never heard of and are happier for). The Roxio brand covered their line of optical media utilities, some of which were horribly designed. Toast, back in the day, was among the very first and for a while the best CD burning utilities for the Mac.

I don’t know how many years it has been, but is has been from the beginning of Intuit. Yes, there have been problems along the way including a couple so severe I said I’d never use the product again. But I always come back because TurboTax always does the job and makes it a lot easier than doing it manually. I hate all the ads and cross selling and wish they would stop, but there is no hope of that.

Corel has trod a long and rocky road. Way back when, Corel was a pacesetter, its CorelDraw product at the head of the pack. The company was led by a flamboyant entrepreneur who, with his glamorous wife, were regulars on the local high society scene. They are long-gone from the company. Since the high-flying days, the company has lost its dominant position and sometimes struggled for survival. Product quality and customer service deteriorated and I, along with many others, stopped buying or updating Corel products.

Long ago - only a few years actually - I was a big fan of Magix products. They delivered tremendous value for the money even though they were often unstable. That was then: this is now. The budget movie editing software market has lots of entries. MACIX Movie Edit Pro is just one of them and while not at all bad, it is not a stand out. Cyberlink PowerDirector, TrakAx inexpensive and very much worth trying), Adobe Premiere Elements, Corel VideoStudio, all of them and more provide virtually identical features.

In the beginning, there was Norton, specifically Peter Norton who brought the world Norton Utilities in the early 80s, the first hugely successful package of PC utilities which would do wondrous things like recover accidentally deleted files. Norton AntiVirus wasn’t far behind. Norton wrote books, produced utility software and in 1990 sold out to Symantec. Over the years Norton AntiVirus in particular became a go-to product. It also became bloated, buggy and slow and a lot of people, including me, migrated to more agile products.

Anti-virus and spyware programs offer some of the choicest morsels in the freeware phenomenon. This program is typical of its commercial genre: big, slow and a resource hog. Anti-virus and spyware programs should be left to run t night or whenever else you are not using the computer. I don’t have any kind of formal procedure for testing spyware programs. I run a commercial anti-virus and spyware package and occasionally run freeware programs to see how each performs against the others.

I’ve been a serious photographer for more than fifty years. Back in the day, using filters was expensive, inconvenient, unpredictable and irreversible. You could practically win an award at a photo show for any successful creative use of filters in your print. I started using this package when it was first developed by another company. I’ve continued to use it through the present day - and I also use its primary competitor from Nik Software.

First impressions count - and my first impression of Corel’s Video Studio Pro X4 is definitely negative. I have a long history with this product, going back to its days as Ulead’s video editor. It was flaky then, stayed flaky in the occasional upgrade I’ve purchased and remains flaky in this most recent version. I needed an inexpensive video editor for another computer and I am up to my license limit on the other packages I own and my earlier VideoStudio packages are not Windows 7 compatible.

This was my first experience with a Kaspersky product. My experience was not at all unpleasant, but it wasn’t spectacular either. The product installed without a hitch on a computer running Windows 7 64-bit. The interface seems somewhat dated and the program appears to be something of a resource hog, though nothing equals the Norton products of a dew years ago when it comes to awful performance. How well does Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2014 work?

The progress is low-priced video editing programs over the past few years is nothing less than astounding. Originally, Corel acquired what has become VideoStudio Pro X2 from Ulead. Ulead’s products were always ambitious and often too quirky to use. In this case, Corel has tamed the base product and turned out a very usable video editing and DVD authoring package that compares very favorably with the stalwart Adobe Premiere Elements.