MobileMe Retail Review

It pains me to write this review, both as a shareholder and as a 20+ year fan of Apple products, I have to say I believe Apple did not think the Mobile Me launch through well enough.
A week after launch, the Apple support forums are riddled with users having problems, with some of the worst problems being NO ACCESS TO EMAIL.
Apple claims that 1% of users are withoutemail access.
1% of how many millions of users?
This has been going on 5 days now, as of this writing.
Unfortunately, I am one of those 1%'ers going on 4 days now without access to a PAID email service. I have used this PAID service for over 4 years and have been very satisfied with it.
Unfortunately, Apple is not being up front about the details of the outage and what is going on, their chat support appears to be kept in the dark, intentionally, offering nodetail,ETA, or resolution.
As an IT professionalspecialized in enterprise storage, high availability, backup and recovery,this is completely unacceptable!
I cannot in good conscience recommend this product to anyone at this time.
This throws into serious question whether 'cloud computing' is worth it.
If you decide to put your email, contacts, calendars, precious photos, in "THE CLOUD"....
Be prepared for a rainy day or two or three or 4 or 5....
Read More >>

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 Review

I have used PE4 successfully for quite awhile.I tried upgrading to PE6 a few months ago, but found the software too slow and buggy.I am working on large files and it was much slower than PE4.I went back to PE4 and waited for PE7.I have only had PE7 for a few days, but so far I am not impressed. Loading and converting my catalogs went smoothly, but PE7 is still a memory hog and buggy.PE7 is much slower than PE4 -- there is noticeable and annoying lag trying to generate thumbnails in my catalog in the organizer.When trying to use the editor, the program only works for a few minutes before giving me an error and randomly shutting down, resulting in a lot of lost work.
There are some software upgrades that look very promising (if I can get to work).In particular, the automated action feature is an improvement over PE4.And, you can now adjust the background of the organizer so it is lighter than PE6 (although still not as user friendly as PE4 in my opinion).I will keep looking for a solution, but so far I am very disappointed with this software.
I am updating my review in response to comments.I am reasonably competent on the computer, but I am not a power user and don't want to waste a lot time troubleshooting. I use PE extensively for photo editing and digital scrapbooking. I don't have a cutting edge system (I'll post exact specs later when I have more time), but I have updgraded it, including bringing it up to 2GB RAM.My system runs XP.It is a very good, but not brand new system that ran PE4 like a dream.If you are like me and looking to upgrade, expect problems and save your money until you can also by a new computer.If you have a brand new computer, you will probably enjoy this software.
Read More >>

Norton Internet Security 2009 1User 3Pc Review

Product same as one that says No operating system, but can be installed on 3 PCs)
I have been using NIS since 2006 for both my desktop and laptop for virus protection. While none of them have given significant problems to me, this is by far the best NIS yet!
Installation: Installation was a real snap. It was amazingly quick. Removal of NIS2008 (automatic) took a few minutes and with one restart the whole installation and live update was finished in under 10 minues (My PCs dont have the latest processors: one is a pentium D 3.0G/1g memory and the other is a centrino 1.8 with 2G memory).
Interface: The interface looks very similar to NIS2008, but more sleek and informative. The phising protection and log=in key cards in your browsers look better than before. much smaller though!
Configuration: NIS2009 retained all my configurations regarding which networks are safe and all other preferences from NIS2008. This was great! I didnt have to reconfigure anything (except the add-on; see below), saving me a lot of time. For new users, there are many options configured by default and easy to change.
Anti-virus and internet protection: After installation, I just browsed a number of websites that I usually do. In one website, I got a download installator warning from NIS and the problem was immediately resolved with out any damage to the computer. Looking at the 'history', I could see a number of Low risk issues resolved by NIS with out any annoying popups. Ofcourse, you can set NIS to popup for every risk (even the low riks ones) if you like.
More than anything, it retains your subscription to NIS2008. So you dont have to use your new key until your current susbcription expires. You will continue to get NIS2009 virus updates as well. (I recd a couple of comments: Use Norton online account for saving your keys rather than entering the new key during installation) - Read my comment below.
Add-on package: If you used the parental control and privacy protection add-on package with 2008, it gets uninstalled and NIS 2009 does NOT automatically update it!! So, you need to manually install the add on package which can be done from the config window easily. User-specific parental cotrols are carried over from 2008 though! NIS 2009 offers custom parental control settings as well, a little better than 2008 version.
Performance: This is really not a resource hog which use to be one major con of Norton products. It does virus updates more frequently and when the computer is idle. So you dont feel its presence. Only thing that takes long time and consumes resource is the full scan which you dont have to do that often or can schedule it during lunch time!
So I really like it so far!
Read More >>

Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 Review

The "Home and Student" license is for non-commercial use only.The product requires activation, which includes sending machine identification information to Microsoft.
The good news is that the license allows installation on up to three machines and (over time) you can transfer the license to new systems.
From the license: "You may install one copy of the software on three licensed devices in your household for use by people who reside there. ... During activation, the software will send information about the software and the device to Microsoft. ... You may reassign the license to a different device any number of times, but not more than one time every 90 days."
Read More >>

Internet Marketing: The Real Facts About Blogs And The Biggest Blog Lie

This is the information that I will like to share after I have listen to Armand Morins presentation at an internet seminar in Singapore. This article will reveal what is the biggest blog lies and what are the things that you can do with blogging.

A Blogger blog is very easy to use and you will be able to get it for free from www.Blogger.com. It is one of the most popular places where many people create their blog. One of the biggest blog lie that Armand has revealed is a Blogger blog will be easily indexed because Google owns it. This is not totally true. He reveals that there is no Blogger Blogs that is on the top 100 world blog in the world.

So here is the list of Blogging dos:

Use wordpress as blog because there are a lot of successful people who make use of wordpress.

Make sure that the blog address will sits on your website.

A wordpress blog can be optimized with plug in.

A wordpress blog is easy to use.

Install the Optimum Title Plug-in on your wordpress blog.

What Armand is emphasizing is to have a wordpress blog because most of the popular blog in the word uses a wordpress blog. He also mentions that some of the things that people must do with their blog. I hope that you will find the information in the article to be useful to you when you plan on starting your own blog.

Zack Lim is an up and coming affiliate marketer who owns http://www.MyAffiliateMarketingOnline.com providing information on Affiliate Marketing. To get Free "7 Days to Affiliate Marketing" course, go to http://www.MyAffiliateMarketingOnline.com This article is free for republishing by visitors provided the resource link is retained.
Read More >>

QuickBooks Pro 2009 Review

I cannot believe Intuit has completely destroyed this product with the 2009 version.
Downloading transactions and matching into a bank account or credit card account is a waste of time and I do mean waste of actual time. We download sometimes 50-100 banking transactions a day and a similar number of credit card transactions. The ability to automatically match those transactions is extemely old school ( a major regression for QB ) as each one must be done manually one by one. Gone is the "add multiple" to allow QB the ability to matchup payees and aliases. That feature allowed the input of hundreds of transactions in less than 5 seconds. Now hundreds of transactions will take no less than 5 hours.
This is the single biggest change between 2008 and 2009, completely for the worse. Any other changes are strictly smoke and mirrors to sell something new with glitz and glamour. If your business generate more than a few banking transactions a day or week, stay away from version 2009. Your online banking "time" will increase to an amount that it will take away from other tasks.
Aside from rushing Quicken and Quickbooks to market with major bug problems in each of the last few years and also sending support calls to India, removing the "add multiple" feature from online banking is the single biggest blunder Intuit has ever made.
Thankfully, I have a backup of my QB 2008 file. It's time to uninstall 2009 and re-install 2008!!!!
Consider yourself warned...
Read More >>

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home

I was running office 2004 and waiting for this. This review is limited but I was looking for specific things.

The good:
-universal binary (faster on intel macs)
-PowerPoint now shows the slides on the left instead of just the text outline.
-you can install it alongside office 2004 and run both versions on the same computer

The bad:
-dragging images from other apps doesn't work anymore
-when you paste an image in word or PowerPoint, it gets converted to a different format so that if you put it back to the original app it's a simple picture instead of an editable one. (for example if you make an illustration in OmniGraffle, paste it in word 2008, you come back a week later and decide you want to tweak it, you can no longer copy the image back to OmniGraffle and edit it. You either must have saved the original or start over. Office 2004 didn't do this and so sadly I'm more productive with office 2004).
-installation is not drag and drop anymore and it installs things like silverlight without asking you. I feel my Mac got dirty now with who knows what installed where.

What didn't change
-you still can't generate motion paths in PowerPoint (to move objects around on a slide) like you can in the PC version since a few versions ago. But you can play this back fine if you generated the PowerPoint on a PC.

Conclusion
-intentionally crippled.
-a step backward for me as I want to use it for lectures in my class but now I'm afraid to because I have hundreds of diagrams and illustrations that now will be locked in PowerPoint.
-I'm going to completely use Keynote/Pages (iWork) from now on. Unfortunately some 3rd party apps require Office so I'm stuck with it. And it doesn't have all the features yet of Office.
-Unfortunately OpenOffice/NeoOffice exhibit the same image formating problem and they have their own issues.

Disappointing.
EDIT:
I have since reformatted my computer and sold Office to a Colleague who needed it. Good Riddance. So long Microsoft.
EDIT #2:
To add a hopeful note, I discovered Nisus Pro word processor. It does (technical writing) things Pages doesn't (e.g. index) and seems better than MS Word.
Read More >>