I’ve used Dragon for a few years and this new edition, 5.0 for Mac, works fairly well. I’d give it a 95 percent accuracy rating – which if fine because I just use it to dictate notes for me each evening. Basically it writes my journal. I type at work all day and it’s great just to sit back and just speak freely. I guess I am used to the voice commands and do them without thinking much about it.

I have been using Corel Painter Essentials 5 to turn photos of our family, pets and places of interest around our local community into fun and interesting pieces of art now hanging on our walls (thanks to both PictureItOnCanvas and CanvasPeople… I use whichever service has the best sale going on at any one time). My family now has six canvases of varying sizes and we are planning on creating more during an upcoming skiing trip all thanks to Corel Painter.

I’ve grown up with Microsoft Office and have come to rely on it for both work and my personal stuff. Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Student has everything I need from the classic Office suite: Word, PowerPoint, Excel. In past versions, installation wasn’t exactly intuitive. That problem was solved in this version. Just pop in the disc, enter the registration code and the installation wizard does the rest. You just click a few times and it’s done.

I’ve used Norton for years but stopped using an antivirus when I switched from Windows PC to a new IMAC about a year ago. I decided to go ahead and put AV on my IMAC so purchased Norton again. No issues with installation and doesn’t seem to slow down the computer. This purchase came with 5 licenses so I also installed on my and my wife’s new Samsung Galaxy 5 smartphones with no issues.

Yes I’ve come out of the dark ages because I’ve been doing our taxes by hand, pencil and paper, for years. And just not the simple 1040 and standard deduction stuff either. Rental property, depreciation, Excel schedules, etc. But I have to admit, tax time was not too much of a drudgery this time because of TurboTax. I’ll continue to invest the $60 - $70 bucks in the future.

Third year now of using TurboTax and am very satisfied. I also use it for my mother’s tax return. Both of us have rental property so need the premier version. Because my mother lives in another state, I had to buy additional state for her state return.

I’ve used Norton Ghost 14.0 without problems but needed to upgrade to Ghost 15.0 which supports Windows 7. So far no issues. It was simple to install. Don’t forget to register your product with Symantec.

I’ve been using Paint Shop Pro since version 7. When Corel first bought it from it’s shareware creators, they began to dumb it down and it really lost a great deal of its following. Fortunately, they left most of the power under the hood and those features that had been dumbed out of the menus, were still accessible for power users. I’ve since upgraded to PSPX and PSP 14, so I am very familiar with the program.

I initially had some problems getting the program to install, but a fairly quick contact with customer service, they got me up and running and I was drawing. I have an Intuos 5 Wacom tablet and some experience with drawing software. I am fairly familiar with Photoshop and Manga Studio 5. This program us neither of those things, although it is probably much closer to Manga Studio 5 if you are comparing it to something.

I appreciated the sniping tool in Vista – but I hated Vista so much I reinstalled XP. So I missed the sniping tool and Googled for a solution and found Snag It! Snag It! is far, far superior to the simpleton tool Microsoft had (SURPRISE. I whole heartly recommend this if you need to send screen shots with comments.