This software comes with some helpful tutorials that are very useful in learning the software. It took very little time to download and set up compared to some other video editing software. It also does not pause or crash like my Pinnacle software or the generic Windows movie making software. Simple mode is not designed for major video editing like transitions and text editing. It’s made for cutting your clips to size.

Pinnacle had a reputation for user-friendly, well priced software that made it easy to do amateur video editing. It’s an entry level video editing program. Current versions have been a little disappointing as they add new features but in the process make it top heavy and less intuitive and slow. First off, there should have been an option to install and then search for media files - not indexing the media files as part of it’s install.

To register this software you must call a number and be subjected to an extreme sales pitch to upgrade. After that you find that this is a page publisher like MS Publisher to create newsletters etc. There are some useful features but it will feel clunky to those used to the Microsoft interface or even Photoshop Elements etc. Overall, this is a good entry level software if you can avoid the registration hassle.

This Norton software is set up to work when your laptop is on WiFi. It sounded cool as you can lock down your laptop remotely and show a courtesy message, but as people have pointed out anyone with some knowledge of computers may be able to over ride it, if they reinstall the operating platform. This software proved mostly useless, as it did not locate my mobile device accurately. For my laptops it was a little fussy to set up, especially on Windows 8.

This software works with Mac or Windows or iOS devices and can be used by 5 users or 5 devices. It protects your logins and passwords by creating a secure private connection. Very important for those who conduct business in coffee shops, and regularly log on to secure sites in public. It accomplishes this task by creating a VPN and encrypting your connection and making it invisible on public networks, so spy software will not be able to track it.

MS Outlook has been invaluable for emailing, calendar, reminders etc. for quite some time. Outlook 2007 tried to add more features and functionality but unless you upgrade to Word 2007 as commented by other reviewers you lose some of the word processing features. Also, it may be just me but my computer has started running slower since I installed this version of Outlook.

This software installed easily but made me remove some other malware software from my computer. It has a much less annoying interface than Kaspersky and does not slow your system down like Norton Antivirus. I am using it mainly for the parental controls. It allows you to set parental controls for selected Windows user accounts. You can set different levels of controls or choose from a pre-selected menu example, for Teens.

WinZip is useful as it’s ubiquitous, files can be unzipped by anyone, which makes it a good tool to manage and email large files. Of course, it’s also useful to be able to zip them to store them in the Cloud, especially if you have the free versions and have much less storage space. It also allows you to carry multiple files on SD cards or USB drive or even your tablet.

This software allows you to convert all Microsoft format documents into a single PDF. There are already some free PDF converters available such as PrimoPDF that support converting a regular document to PDF. This software lets you combine pages from various files in Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc. to create one PDF. The user interface is easy as you just have to drag and drop pages from multiple source documents. It allows you to rotate the view and delete pages after you have compiled your master PDF document.

This software is very large in size and takes up too much space on my already crowded system. I had used QuickBooks earlier and found the Office Accounting Professional to have some good features but overall it is cumbersome, slow and not very intuitive in some aspects. I think it is a good solution for a home office but is not robust enough for small business use. However, the integration with MS Office is good and helps transport some of the data more easily.