The old Turbo Tax data did actually transfer as suggested. I was also a 20 year Turbo Tax customer. Not any more. They screwed me once before on a state return but not this time.

I have to confess that I was biased against McAfee even before I received my free copy. Why? Well just about every new PC comes with a free 1 month trial subscription to McAfee. In my experience, uninstalling McAfee was always unnecessarily complicated (this from a guy who majored in computer science and assembled his own PCs) - it was almost as if you were expected to give up on installing and just pay them the money.

This tracking system has to be similar to the one used by Progressive Insurance to monitor your driving. I decided not to use Progressive’s device when I worked out that the savings to a driver were minimal. Now this device has a reasonable upfront cost and a monitoring fee of $20/month. With that you get quite a useful tracking system. You can monitor your kids driving - speed, braking locations. I guess if your car gets stolen and the thief doesn’t disconnect the device you also have a way of locating your car.

Let me say up front that the only programs I care about in this package are Word and Excel. Frankly, I do not see much improvement in either program versus the 2011 version. If you don’t HAVE to get the new version (say for file compatibility with coworkers or customers) I would suggest you pass on this version.

This is Peachtree accounting renamed as Sage. It has some nice features - actually nicer than those in QuickBooks but you pay a price for the nicer features - much of this has to be renewed by subscription each year. You can export data to and from Excel - but then you can do that with Quickbooks too. Overall, most small businesses would be better off with Quickbooks.

It is over 30 years since I got my first PC and 50 years since I wrote my first computer program. I’ve pretty much worked with computers all my life - and, since day one, I have always wanted things to be easy. I always reasoned that silicon chips have a really lousy union and they should do all the grunt work not me. Well, Norton’s 360 product just about fits the bill.

I just bought this from Amazon and, sadly, I think I’ll have to return it on compatibility grounds. So far, I’ve only tried Quattro Pro. Excel Macros don’t work. I still haven’t figured how to get into Basic - that menu item is shaded and doesn’t seem to work. Standard spreadsheet functions like @OFFSET do not appear to work - I checked HELP and the syntax seems to be the same as for Excel but I gave up trying to figure out how to get my working Excel sheet to return any kind of VALUE (you can do that in Excel) - what I got instead was some weird string that looks like a REFERENCE.

This review is based on feedback from my son the film director(not kidding).nHe liked the following:-nThe included music files and Scorefitter library.nThe video effects library.nThe support for many, many types of video files.nHe did not like:-nThe sloooow installation process and wonders why some software vendors give no useful updates on how the installation process is going. He thought the installation had crashed.nThe disorganized documentation and the resulting difficulty of learning the program’s features.

Norton has been around for decades - ever since Peter Norton wrote the Norton Utilities. I have used Norton security before but took a brief vacation from Norton to try McAfee. Bad idea! McAfee is a pain to live with and the screens that keep popping up are very annoying. It also seems to slow down your computer until it is like swimming through molasses. Back to Norton, this is pretty much the same old product.

This is Peachtree accounting renamed as Sage. It has some nice features - actually nicer than those in QuickBooks although the Pro version of Sage has slightly less functionality than Quickbooks. Much of this has to be renewed by subscription each year. If you do not need to do inventory tracking then the Pro package is cheaper than the Premium package. I guess most small businesses can live with the limitation to a single user.