This is a review of the old version. I’d recommend getting the new version. Rosetta Stone uses language recognition and a series of levels to make sure you are learning the language as you move forward. If you complete all three levels you will be able to at least stumble your way through very basic conversations. If you need to become more fluent you can simply repeat the sets multiple times.

I’d like to give it 0 stars but that isn’t an option. For starters, it was erroneously changing my refund from over $2000 to under $800 when I added a $3 1099-DIV. Yes, a 3$ dividend was moving the refund down by about $1,200. Yes I double and triple checked to make sure it was entered as $3 and not some larger amount. Also, this software COMPLETELY CHOKES on partnership K-1s if you have a box 11 code C loss.

I had installed Bitdefender on both my PC and my Mom’s PC. After a few weeks it became clear that something was wrong. On a reboot, or resume from hibernation, there were occasions when the bitdefender icon in the system tray would be grayed out. Hovering over it only indicated that the process had failed to start and to reboot the system. I went into to computer management to check the logs but Vista was not recording anything for this so i had pretty much nothing diagnostically useful.

As I write this review McAfee is using approximately 100megabytes of memory. This is clearly a consideration if RAM is in short supply on your machine. McAfee has never had a light footprint when it comes to system resources and this version is no different (this probably won’t be noticeable on newer machines). The install process was easy on all three machines I installed the software on (2 running XP Pro and one running Vista Ultimate).

So far I’ve had to uninstall this software from 2 computers because it slowed them down too much. If you’re looking for something lightweight that has a great detection engine I’d recommend Kaspersky.

About the only video I’m interested in working with is the video that I get from my cell phone. I have Motorola RAZR so it isn’t some obscure model no one ever heard of. I was surprised to see that there was no support for the 3g2 file format in Ulead. I contacted Corel to make sure that they did, in fact, not support this file format. They don’t–at least not yet.

It is hard these days to use anything other than MS Office. So many workplaces have standardized on Microsoft’s products that even the thought of using anything else is unthinkable. Well, WordPerfect is still alive and kicking and they have made an excellent office suite here. It may not be enough to dislodge your workplace from Microsoft’s iron grip but it is certainly good enough for home use and for students to use.

Some years I have problems installing or getting the updates to work. But this year everything went just right. Even my import from Quicken went without a hitch. it is a beautiful thing when the import from Quicken matches the statement from my broker to the penny. Printing copies both on paper and to a .pdf file went very well. Maybe part of all this ease of use was related to the fact that I did NOT import last year’s data in.

I was a Quicken 2010 user and it kept nagging me to upgrade. So I did. On the plus side it didn’t break anything for me. All my budget stuff and my custom reports seem to work fine. On the other hand it also did not fix some really truly annoying problems I have with the software. 1) There are some banks that really don’t work with Quicken. I sincerely wish that Quicken would provide more details on how and why a bank’s one-step update has failed.

I thought I’d give H&R Block’s software a try this year and that was a disaster. I came running back to Turbotax and everything went smooth as butter. All my transactions came in seamlessly from Fidelity and Scottrade and they all matched exactly what I have in Quicken (I like to do the cross check). I have some fairly complicated K-1s and TT handled them no problem. It imported last year’s return no problem and that helped speed everything up greatly.