Good for taxes.

Good for the taxes.

So to start, let’s get this out of the way. There are a lot of free products out there. These suites are perfectly fine for an average users, with a notch down on the scale in terms of the user interface and visual appeal. These suites do lack some features for power users, or, if money is not really a consideration, maybe the user interface is worth the extra funds.

So it took me a really long time to review this product, and I think the issue is I found out i really just don’t edit photos very often. Now I am not new with software, and I love computers but trying to get that perfect picture or artsy up a photo turns out not to be my hobby. I do have family members asking me about some of these programs though so I started it up again.

First of all, this version was new until just a couple of months ago and according to Acronis Customer Support, they have no inclination to have this software support Windows 7. Why? Because they want you to buy the new version, 2010. Even if you recently purchased 2009, you’re just out of luck here. (Unless you purchased it in their 30 day window), but they did run a nice promotion for 2009 just outside of the official 2010 release.

I understand that there is a tendency to continue producing what a company thinks work. Learning a new language or brushing up on your existing skill is tricky business. I learned a lot of Japanese learning in Japan, but it’s not always possible to just go to a country to cement or start your language skills so I picked up the Spanish version. The largest problem I am having the the Instant Immersion series (in general) is they don’t seem to update anything.

I used quicken years ago, and I pretty much stopped using it when they insisted, strongly, that you have to upgrade each year to the new version to get any sort of support or downloads. I started using Spreadsheets after that, and have done pretty well. Well, Quicken 2013 seemed like as good as time as any to give it another go… and I ran into the same problems I had before.

It took me a very long time to configure this program and even now I have problems. As with any speech recognition software, you need to ‘teach’ it to recognize your own speech patterns. I’m still fighting with it even after a month of constant use. I constantly have to check if it interpreted my commands correctly and end up doing about 50% of the work via mouse and keyboard. The rest of the configuration is little better.

This is really an amazing product. I’ve only ever fiddled with digital art as a hobbiest via GIMP, but this tool was incredibly easy to pick up. I’ve used it both with a mouse and tablet and was amazed at how powerful it was and how much I could do. I’m sure I’ve just scratched the surface of it’s capabilities, so the only caveat I can imagine is that some users may want to start out on a simpler version and save some money.

I installed this on my main laptop and on my netbook about 6 months ago. The installation itself was very simple and so far I haven’t had any issues with viruses or even too many scan pop-ups. So, so far, so good.