Avast is a great antivirus program. The problem is that what you download is a trial program. If you like to play hopscotch, you line up a bunch of these trial offers and install a new one whenever the limit expires. I prefer stability

Didn’t work

Right now this is all the antivirus I have on my laptop. I get better protection from this than I did from iobit. Amazon has outdone itself with this free offer. I buy a lot from Amazon and find the whole company great, especially the freebies.

I use it daily

This is the 3rd Edition of PowerDirector I’ve used and the basic tools and layouts are essentially the same as previous versions. If you’re comfortable with the old version, you should feel at home here. There aren’t a lot of new features but there is a marked improvement in performance. I was able to work with high definition video without downsampling and it ran smoothly in the advanced editor. Start up and applied effects are also faster as well as shorter render times with 64 bit performance.

After faithfully backing up my hard disc to recovery points for almost a year I tried to do a system restore last night. The first time failed and said that the registry entries had been corrupted. The 2nd time I went to a restore point earilier and there were still corrupted registry entries, but it worked better. Now certain programs won’t launch, those that do seem slower. I’m not certain that reinstalling the software that won’t launch will be sufficeint to solve the problem.

Great product that’s reliable and easy to install. This version added some extra cloud storage and other features. It updates daily to make sure you have the latest virus definitions. I’ve trusted my computers to Norton for years and the interface has been trimmed down to just show you the essentials–it’s definitely a set it and forget it type of program that doesn’t require much feedback from you to keep things running clean and up to date.

I have had many versions of Pinnacle Studio over the years and haven’t liked it much since they jettisoned the original Studio and converted Avid Studio to take it’s place. It you are running the 64 bit version some of your old content won’t work with this version. Gone are the Red Giant add ons replaced by an inferior number of New Blue Effects. Support for 4K video editing has been added.

Nero 8 Ultra Edition is the next submission in a long line of upgrades to the venerable line of cd/dvd editing/authoring software. If you have a high def. video camcorder or other more recent hardware, the upgrade price may be worth your while to upgrade–for me I have found it not worth it. Perhaps it is worth it for more Vista compatibility though, even though I don’t use the special Vista features.

This is a peculiar product in that it allows for Camera Raw file processing, but yet fails to include support for some of the most common file formats–most noticeably Photoshop or PSD images. A person sophisticated enough to shoot their images in RAW format would most likely have either Photoshop Elements or one of the full Photoshop iterations (which also add cataloguing and viewing software of their own). This software only supports RAW, JPG, and TIFF file formats–I think it’s odd that it doesn’t support GIF and BMP at very least (two formats one will most likely encounter on the web or in Windows).