I give this product another try every couple years just to see how/if it’s been improved. This is still better than a lot of the other choices out there, but still not the best, or the one that I actively use on my systems. It seems to bog down the system down less, and use less resources than in the past. That could be because the computers are getting faster with more memory, and I just notice it less.

If you have used previous versions of this software suite on your Mac before, you will probably notice a lot of differences with this one. Some for the good, some for the bad. Excel is the component most of us take issue with. Yes, you can make and open larger spreadsheets now, but in dropping the Visual Basic, our previous macros are worthless. It’s still slow to open large spreadsheets as well.

This is a pretty big suite of programs to help protect you in the online world. It will do the job, but in my opinion it uses too many resources, and slows down my systems a bit too much for my taste. It does offer protection for almost everything you do online, a little bit of overkill for some. I wouldn’t use half the stuff includes myself. If you have a lot of devices like tablets, netbooks, etc, this will cover them all.

If you have used previous versions of this software suite on your Mac before, you will probably notice a lot of differences with this one. Some for the good, some for the bad. Excel is the component most of us take issue with. Yes, you can make and open larger spreadsheets now, but in dropping the Visual Basic, our previous macros are worthless. It’s still slow to open large spreadsheets as well.

This is one of the best anti virus programs out there. It is much better than most of it’s competitors. It detects many more viruses and almost over protects you, which for the average user is a good thing. It seems to come up with less false positives than others, which is a result of an active team of researchers and responders. A lot of the free virus checkers are set to be overly suspicious and tend to block or warn you of too many legitimate programs or applications, which tends to get annoying fast, and probably a lot of people turn them off because of that.

I had Norton 360 before this, and it made my computer horribly SLOW. Vipre doesn’t slow down regular operations, but it does seem to slow down the speed at which programs start-up. I can live with that – it slows them, but not too badly. Once the programs are running, I can’t detect any slowness. As for the protection: well, I don’t think I’ve gotten any viruses or spyware since I’ve had Vipre running.

I hate Quicken, but it seems to be the only thing available that does the basic banking functions that it does. I love MS Money, but they stopped supporting it several years ago, so I had to go to Quicken. I hate it, yet, I stick with it, because I haven’t found any better alternatives. Dear Intuit - if you read this, please hire me to help you design an alternative version of this product.

First off, this will NOT accept information from Quickens Essentials for Mac, the copy that Intuit has been using for the past couple years. Second, it still will not accept downloaded information from my bank or brokerage and both are among the largest in the nation and they don’t charge for downloads. Say what you will about Quicken Essentials but at least it accepts downloads (albeit through a back door method).

I bought Parallels for Mac because of previous problems with other similar program, VM Ware. In all fairness, the VM product was a beta so I should have guessed it would be buggy, but even the non beta version had its fair share of bugs. Although VM Ware loaded XP home without a hitch, using the program was fraught with difficulties. First, it was slow as molasses in January. I’m not taking just a little slow, I’m talking ‘go to lunch and maybe it’ll be finished’ slow.

Some may remember Peachtree Accounting from a few years ago. If so, this is it. No, I’m not kidding or playing some sort of game, Sage 50 was actually Peachtree at one time and the box is nice enough to tell you so up front. Does that matter? To some it may since Peachtree, while a very capable accounting package, was notoriously difficult to work with and had a steep learning curve.