First off, I had used Microsoft Streets & Trips 2008 previously, and liked it very much, although I felt it could do a little better job of getting you to national parks, landmarks and other points of interest. (For example, for Pike’s Peak, it tried to take us up the back side of the mountain thru a locked private gate as opposed to getting us to the park entrance). The 2009 version seems to do a much better job of getting you to where you want to go, and did actually take us to the correct entrance to Pike’s Peak.

Bitdefender works really well on both vista and xp machines, and I really like the clean interface and the fact that it runs pretty low key in the background without excessive popups requiring user responses and it doesn’t drag down system resources. It installs flawlessly, and even will uninstall other antivirus software in case you forgot to do this yourself, which I thought was a really nice touch. My main criteria for security software is that it needs to run quietly in the background and not hog resources or cause other system issues - which McAfee Antivirus and Norton Internet Security can’t seem to figure out how to do.

AVG anti-virus & anti-spyware installed quickly and flawlessly. It took no technical knowledge and it updated to the latest version. With the help of the scheduler, updates and daily scans are done in the background without interference to any application that I’m using. I would recommend the AVG anti-virus & anti-spyware to everyone.

just like all McAfee products it suffers from poor OS integration and is a bloated round-about way of getting the job done. Windows XP itself will let you keep a folder private - maybe not super securely, but how many people are going to have a hacker in their home trying to get at their files? I was really wanting something that would let me share a folder on the network, but encrypt it and password protect it, so that I can access sensitive files on my desktop from my laptop - since I refuse to store sensitive information on a laptop that could be lost.

Whenever anyone asks me which virus protection they should use - this is the one I recommend - for several reasons. It is fast and light and has no noticeable impact on pc performance. It is reliable, I put it on my kids computers (and anyone with kids know they are at a higher than average risk for picking up viruses/malware) and they have never had a virus/malware infection on either of their computers.

I installed DragonSpeak (10) for some computer entry. A few weeks later I purchased this software with the idea that if it did no work I was only out a few dollars. After installing it, Dragon speak not only stopped functioning, but would not load and now after removing the Learn to Speak software, it still will not load. I don’t care which software is to blame, just a warning that if you buy this software and use another voice recognition software, they may not be compatible.

Because of nerve damage I have a difficult time typing and thought that this software would be useful. I purchased a good digital microphone and installed the software. Setup seemed easy enough and the learning software was reasonable. I didn’t use it much because it seemed to have problems with Microsoft products (though I could buy an upgrade that - in theory - worked better). A couple weeks later I purchased another piece of software for learning a foreign language and soon neither worked.

I installed DragonSpeak (10) for some computer entry. A few weeks later I purchased this software with the idea that if it did no work I was only out a few dollars. After installing it, Dragon speak not only stopped functioning, but would not load and now after removing the Learn to Speak software, it still will not load. I don’t care which software is to blame, just a warning that if you buy this software and use another voice recognition software, they may not be compatible.

This was available at a significant discount so I bought it from Amazon. I think that the free competitors are as useful and capable as this, but there were some freebies from other companies included in this package that made this worth the price. I also discovered I was looking more for a program that was designed for art work more than this provides. I did purchase a tablet and it makes this much more useful and user friendly.

Working great and good price