In its early years, this operating system was one of the most unsatisfactory I have ever used — including DOS, Win 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows 98. Aside from being incompatible with older hardware, XP Home Edition crashed frequently — especially if you often work with several windows open at once as I do. This was particularly unhelpful. As a writer, I was forced to save documents no less than once for each new sentence, and at touchy moments, literally every few words.

I’ve used only one Rosetta Stone program previously, and I did so for an unconventional purpose, to assist a learning disabled child better acquire English skills. It was quite useful and I recommended it highly. This new reading program is just as good and I daresay can be used with children even younger than the recommended 3 years of age, since it includes shapes and symbols as well as letters and reading basics.

As a refugee from a horribly broken TurboTax Home & Business experience for my 2012 taxes, I decided to try TaxCut this year, and I am very glad that I did. For one thing, TaxCut comes with audit protection included. That is, if the IRS comes calling, you will have help. More importantly, the program is easy to follow, and it works. Updates actually install. They do not break the program and prevent it from running – my experience last year with TurboTax, which forced me eventually to install the program on an entirely new computer in order to be able to complete the job.

This looks like a very comprehensive accounting program, and for a business bigger than mine it would probably work quite well. In truth, I don’t need all the bells and whistles offered here, and had the software not been provided free via the Amazon Vine program, I undoubtedly would not have purchased it.

This is not a very good program, as others have made quite clear. It consumes a great deal of time to install, does not run cleanly, and crashes constantly. While some seem to have had a good experience with this software, I count myself among the vocal minority who were unable to make the thing run. And my computer has a 500 Gig Seagate hard drive and 4 gigabytes of DDR3 memory.

This is a truly dreadful product, worthless to all but the most basic tax-filers. One cannot include here any deductions beyond the scheduled standard deductions, no investment returns, not anything, in fact, except standard w-2 earnings reports and tax. Any need beyond that will require that you buy an extra, much more expensive program. For years, I was a devoted Turbo Tax user. Last year, I switched to H&R Block Business, and the trial of this product confirms the wisdom of that decision.

One colleague in particular has long relied entirely on WordPerfect for her writing. Until recently, it’s been a royal pain. WordPerfect was very difficult to translate into Microsoft Word which, like it or not, is the industry standard for written documents. This Corel Home Office software solves that problem by making the WordPerfect software, at last, easily convertible into Word. Voila. Beyond that, it can also serve as a stand-in for Microsoft Office software — especially if you are not interested in paying the outlandish Microsoft prices, and prefer to avoid the open source OpenOffice software developed by Sun Microsystems.

Norton is just okay. It tends to mess up other programs, and viruses and I’m afraid that trojans also get through. The one advantage of this version over others: its extra features. Also, this version covers several devices. Still, not the best virus and internet protection. Just okay.

I’ve been using AVG on my Windows laptop for 8 months, and find it excellent. The software runs in the background, keeping viruses, hackers and dangerous websites at bay. The software verifies websites BEFORE you visit, warning users when there’s a potential problem. While using search engines, the software provides safety ratings on suggested results. Users can totally avoid counterfeit websites with this software — which also protects email accounts and instant messaging (if you use that).

have a 32-bit operating system but I still could not figure out how to make this Power Director 13 program work. I hate Windows Media Player, which has not worked well for me, and I don’t want to invest a lot of timein fact I don’t have the time to investto learn how to use this thing. Better luck to the next reviewers.