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Review by Mark B
Typical MS Office program, with the functionality and features you would need as a general user. I do prefer the iWork suite except for Pages, where I prefer Word for technical documents. I knocked the rating down a bit since Word and Powerpoint do seem to freeze up on me now and then, and Powerpoint tends to shut down on some graphic-intensive slides.
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Review by Mark B
TurboTax continues to be a bright point in Intuit’s line-up. As usual, critical elements of my 2010 return made the transition smoothly and I was able to put together an initial version of my return with no problem. Perfect for getting a picture of how my final taxes will look so that I can plan deductions, etc. for the reminder of the year. No problem installing and downloading updates. Works great all around.
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Review by Mark B
MapPoint is definitely a step up from your typical online mapping tools. However, I’m not sure that it’s practical for use in business planning like it tries to be. You can map territories, match your product to demographics, and map clients and prospect business, but there is no real compelling reason to do this in MapPoint. The data is likely a couple of years old already, and it does not come with free updates (except for road construction updates, which is the last thing you care about for business planning).
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Review by Mark B
Seamlessly runs Windows programs. No problems with any programs so far. Quicken, Office Pro, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, Flight Sim, and others run flawlessly.
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Review by Mark B
Installed this on our 2009 iMac running 10.7, and it slowed it to a crawl. I tried to adjust the setting to make the protection less resource-intensive, but it was just too slow. Perhaps if you have a very new Mac with more memory, the sluggishness would not be as noticeable; but for an older Mac, I cannot recommend this product. We ended up having to uninstall it, which is too bad, since the features look great.
Posts
Review by Mark B
TurboTax continues to be a bright point in Intuit’s line-up. As usual, critical elements of my 2010 return made the transition smoothly and I was able to put together an initial version of my return with no problem. Perfect for getting a picture of how my final taxes will look so that I can plan deductions, etc. for the reminder of the year. No problem installing and downloading updates. Works great all around.
Posts
Review by Mark B
If you are ready to step up form iPhoto, but don’t want to plunk down the cash for Aperture, then Pixelmator is a reasonable mid-way solution. Especially when you look at the bargain prices you can get it for these days. I wouldn’t really recommend it for the pro, but for the recreational picture toucher-upper, or for a student working on a project, Pixelmator is a good solution for the price.
Posts
Review by Mark B
We just spent a few weeks designing a new home using Freestyle. It was fun and very easy. The new sketch overlay feature allowed us to add conceptual items, but then remove them to see the house layout. We also created a platte, complete with walkways, garden, septic, driveway, etc. Dimensions and measurements are always displayed and can actually be made to appear on the drawing. The precision of the grid system was sometimes a challenge to get just right (I could be a bit smoother and refined on my computer), but it is generally acceptable for a casual user.