Microsoft Windows Vista Business 64-bit for System Builders Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Although I love the UI, it did slow down my routine as I adapted to the new layout and menus and such. This was expected (somewhat) and was not the root of the problem, though.
The reason for the 3 star rating is the fact that all my 32 bit apps that I was looking forward to getting a perfoemance boost from due to the 64 bit processor I am running, ultimately were absolutely sluggish when it came to menu navigation and usability within the apps themselves.
Menu navigation was sluggish and showed unusual latency while navigating within Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, etc. Windows itself was snappy, but interpolation of the 32-bit apps in the 64-bit OS was absolutely sluggish. Rendering times in After Effects, and compression times in Sorenson Squeeze, seemed fast enough, but hard to compare, as I was coming from a single core P4.
Also very much worth mentioning...aside from the occasional unsupported driver (which I expected)...after typing in my password and logging in OK, the touch of any key on the keyboard would immediately lock up the system. (It took me hours to narrow this glitch down to the Event Log Service!). Finally disabled the Event Log service and viola', keystrokes allowed. (odd, but worth mentioning).
My son also experienced Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) several times while playing both Stalker and Oblivion.
Also noteworthy for those with an interest in specific platform related info, I am running the OS on a ASUS Formula Maximus mobo, an Intel 2.4 Ghz Quad Core CPU, 4 Gigs of Corsair Dominator DDR2 RAM, and an EVGA Nvidia 8800 GTS w/640 MB DDR3 on board.
Suffice it to say, after paying full price for Vista and installing apps all week, I turned right around and overnighted XP Pro (32-bit version) on week 2, reformatted everything and am happily using XP Pro with no worries or glitches of any kind. ALL apps are BLAZING FAST, both navigationally and in their rendering perfomance. (Games have not BSOD'd since going back to XP either).
If you rely on your Workstation for a living, or expect high-end, production-class workstation performance, stick with XP for the next couple of years until Vista has been battle tested and proven, and apps have had a chance to port over to 64-bit.
(Anybody want to buy an original copy of Vista...cheap? Only used once!)
;~D


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PRINCE OF PERSIA - TWO THRONES (DVD-ROM) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)As someone who enjoyed Sands of Time a lot, I was hoping that some of the reviews I'd read were true that Ubi had learned from the mistakes made with Warrior Within and delivered a game closer in quality to the first in the series.. well, they didn't.
Two Thrones is disappointing from the very first cut scene and doesn't get any better. The story is crap. The writing, also crap. The design choices and the menu interface are irritating and unpolished. It's as if the game Heavy Metal invaded the Prince of Persia universe, turning the Prince and his story into a middle-school stoner's tawdry doodle.
The gameplay tedious and the level of difficulty is basically implemented as an increase in tediousness. This KILLS the fun-factor. Also the dynamics unique to the series (the special powers of the dagger) are completely wasted.. it's almost as if there IS NO dagger. Lots of new attacks were added but the number and activation sequences are too unwieldy to use in practice. The Prince, though finally voiced by the same actor, is not the prince he once was. There is very little in common with what made Sands of Time so much fun.
The production, though I'm sure it was expensive, looks shoddy and feels rushed. In this Windows version, the camera control via the mouse is horrible, jittery, nearly unusable. I ended up getting a 360 controller for playing another game and tried it with this. The camera via controller is much better but then I found this to be the only game that gets a sort of "drift", making the prince creep slowly forward and to the right when I'm not even touching the stick. Turning down the sensitivity fixes it for the most part but it's still weird.
If only Mechner and whoever else was responsible for making Sands of Time such a well-crafted, fun, innovative, charming, visually stunning adventure - hadn't abandoned the team at Ubi.. maybe the last two games could have been better. As it is, they aren't. I kind of wish I could return the Two Thrones.

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The Print Shop 2.0 Deluxe Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I purchased this to replace version 23 thinking that it would be an improvement on some of the problem areas (such as the database function). Boy, was I mistaken. When I received the disk, it had scratches and could not be read in any of my computers. After polishing the disk I finally got it to read. After installing it I realized that none of the old projects will work with the new version. That was a bummer, just by itself, but the real problem with this new version is that it doesn't do half the things the older one did.
The first project I needed to use it for became a real challenge. I wanted to make address labels for set of cards I was sending out family about my parents move. First, there is no internal database feature at all in the new version. It used extracts from your email program in a format that my email doesn't support. After doing a lot of research, I was finally able to get around that problem and then found that the only way it will print labels is to print a full page of them. I thought I must be doing something wrong so I went to the help which is almost useless. Then I tried the Broderbund website support section which was no help because there are no tips generated for this product yet. I finally put in trouble request. This was something I was familiar with because I had already put in a trouble request concerning my unreadable disk. The email reply that comes as a result of this, tells you that you will receive a reply within 48 hours, but that if your question has already been asked and there is a tip on it they will not reply at all.
As I am writing this, about 2 weeks have passed since I submitted these trouble tickets. I have not received a reply to either one and there are no FAQs that answer them. My guess is that they are so inundated by trouble tickets on this product that they have decided to just ignore them all. Shame on you Broderbund. After being a loyal customer for years, I will not be purchasing any more Broderbund products until they decide to actually start providing support.
Some may ask why I just used email to contact them. The answer is simple, the only telephone number they offer for support is long distance (no toll free) and it is listed with a warning to expect hold times averaging 30 minutes or more. I really couldn't see dumping more money into the hole called The Print Shop 2.0 Deluxe.


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It's easier than ever before to create sophisticated print projects in minutes. Start with the brand new Wizard Design tool or choose from an enormous gallery of ready-made templates and contemporary images to design, print and share a wide variety of projects, including greeting cards, invitations, labels, signs and more. The Print Shop has been redesigned from the ground up, making it quicker and easier to use by combining intuitive design tools with contemporary content to give you the ultimate in creative freedom. Design personalized projects in minutes that are perfect for home, work and school.

The All New Way to Create Sophisticated Design
New Easy to Use Software Drag-and-drop photos, text and design elements with incredible ease and quickness.
Windows 7 & Windows Vista Compatible The Print Shop was designed to work on the latest PC operating systems
Wizard Design Tools Create and print over 100 custom projects, each in under 5 minutes.
Streamlined Workspace With a sleek new workspace, it's easy to find and switch between the various tools quickly.
Integrated Photo Editing One-click photo tools allow for common photo editing like cropping, red-eye removal and color correction.
New Templates & Clip Art Choose from an enormous gallery of contemporary ready-made templates and clip art images that are sure to complement any project
Color Match Find the right color for any project using the eye-dropper tool, or select from ten designer color palettes that are sure complement your work.
Advanced Design Tools Slider tools allow you to create custom gradients, transparency and drop shadows for a professional effect.
Easy to Share Print at home, email or publish your latest creation on the web to share with friends and family.
Advanced Page and Layout Tools
Layer Management Easily move art, text and objects between foreground and background. Show and hide layers for the ultimate in precision.
Columns & Text Wrap Flow text across columns to improve readability. Plus, you can easily flow text around graphic and other objects to create a professional finish.
Advanced Color Tools You now have three ways to pick the right color: the eye-dropper tool for precision color matching, professionally-designed color palettes and a color selector.
Drop Shadows & Dynamic Gradients Add a professional touch to any design with easy drop shadow tools. Dynamic gradients allow you to specify multiple gradient stops.
Image Management Edit photo tags and mark your favorites so that you can easily find the right photo for any project. Add your image to the Image Tray for easy drag and drop.
Impressive Headlines The Print Shop now offers the easiest solution for creating headlines with impact. Simply choose from an array of impressive options and customize to make it perfect.

Choose Your Version Find the right Print Shop version for you using the chart below.

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Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I wish I had read the reviews more closely before buying this product (particularly the companion reviews of the regular edition Roxio Toast 10). Usually I discount all the people who give low ratings for poor service as having just had a bad experience. In this case, though, I too have experienced the "unhelpful automated email response" bot. Given the number of reviewers who've mentioned the poor service, it isn't just a couple bad experiences.
Having used the product, I'm not surprised they've gone to automated response. They must be overwhelmed with support requests. The product is a bundle of different programs each of which is shareware-quality. There's no coherency in the user interfaces. Much of the interaction with your media involves dragging things around from the Finder. The "software update" process involves unzipping new applications and copying them on top of the old ones. No smart auto-update.
That said, the collection of "features" is impressive, even if not coherently arranged. AVCHD, Blu-Ray, H264, Elgato, iPhone, Apple TV, Tivo integration are all terrific features to have. I'll admit I haven't played with most of them yet. Thus far I've focused on the Tivo->iPhone pathway.
I installed it on my Macbook Air with attached Apple CD/DVD burner. Performance seems reasonable, though when I accidentally hit "edit" for a Tivo video or try to browse through a bunch of Tivo videos with the Media Browser, it becomes painfully slow.
But the main reason I'm giving it 2 stars is because the Tivo->iPhone pathway has serious defects. Namely, if you set up Tivo Transfer to automatically export to Toast and then set up Toast to automatically convert to iPhone and submit to iTunes, you lose all the series/episode meta-data. Instead each item is given a unique name which destroys the TV Show grouping in iTunes. iPhone syncing works by selecting the most recent unviewed episodes of your selected series. When every episode appears as its own new TV series, syncing becomes very painful.
Further, if you've moved the location of your iTunes media (say to an external drive), Toast can't tell and just puts it in the original location.
Additionally, if you tell Tivo Transfer not to automatically transfer and instead click "Toast It" from within Tivo Transfer, then you're automatically taken to the DVD-burning section of Toast. If you switch over to Convert to iPhone or Apple TV, you can no longer see the transferred video.
The only way I have found to convert items from Tivo to iPhone while preserving Series/Episode data is to find the raw video that Tivo downloaded in Finder and drag each one into Toast and click the convert button. This is rather painful given this is supposed to be a 1st-class feature of Roxio Toast 10.
I have additionally had problems with conversions failing half-way through, but continuing to use 100% of the machine's CPU. In my experience, trying to "Stop" a conversion in process is hit-or-miss... sometimes the CPU just keeps spinning until you manually kill the process from the shell. Also, if you set up Tivo to auto-convert, it appears there's no visible status of what is happening, so there's no way to stop.
In conclusion, for a product labeled "version 10" and "pro" it feels one step better than shareware, but if you need the features it may well be shareware worth buying... just expect some pain with no relief from product support.** UPDATE **
Service has gone from bad to worse. Instead of answering my question as to why the Series/Episode data wasn't preserved when performing auto-export, they first responded with a general email telling me how to delete all my preferences and re-install Toast 10. I dutifully did as they suggested hoping there was a magic bullet there. Sadly it didn't help. When I replied again, they responded with a general email about how to reset and restart all my Tivos.
To make things worse, these boiler-plate emails spell "preferences" as "prefrences" and "MAC address" as "MAK address". Ridiculous.

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Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro is the best way to get pro-quality results in burning, video and photo projects. Enjoy all the power of Toast 10 Titanium plus Blu-ray video authoring and four award-winning photo and audio applications.


Burn HD video to DVD and Blu-ray The Toast 10 High-Def/Blu-ray Disc Plug-in lets you take high-def video footage from AVCHD camcorders, TiVo DVRs and EyeTV and create Blu-ray discs or even standard DVDs with HD content that can be played on any standard Blu-ray set top box or PS3 game console.

High-def to DVD: author HD video to standard DVDs for playback on Blu-ray players
Author HD video to Blu-ray Discs

Use it with your iPhone or iPod
Stream video from your Mac to your iPhone over the Internet, with Streamer iPhone application available from iTunes App Store (free for Toast 10 users)
Cut, trim, and send your favorite video, EyeTV and TiVo recordings, or DVD clips to iTunes for syncing with your iPhone
Capture, identify, and tag streaming Internet audio – automatically sent to your iTunes library
Rip audiobook CDs, complete with individual chapters and pause/resume support for easy playback on iPod or iPhone
Save streaming web video from your favorite web sites and have it sent directly to iTunes

Create a custom soundtrack SmartSound Sonicfire Pro lets you easily orchestrate sophisticated soundtracks for your videos and slideshows. Use unique automatic "Mood Mapping" or select from a library of included music tracks to perfectly match your productions.

Create professional custom soundtracks for movies and slideshows
Easily find musical styles and variations to fit the mood of your movies
Customize the length, arrangement and instrument mix
Change the tempo and pitch
Bonus--mood configurable music tracks

Remove unwanted noise BIAS SoundSoap SE automatically removes unwanted noise like wind, hissing, scratches, and pops from LPs, cassettes, or almost any audio, music or video soundtrack. An intuitive user interface makes advanced noise filtering a breeze.

Remove noise from analog or digital recordings
Remove hiss, room noise, rumble, electrical hum, & other background noise from most digital media files
Solve most simple noise problems with the Learn Noise button
Powerful fine tuning offers even better sound results

Easily add drama to all your photos LightZone is an essential tool for photo enthusiasts. Easily enhance your photos with sophisticated features like zone mapping and relight for professional quality light and color balance. It's a perfect complement to Aperture and iPhoto.

Create dramatic, impactful photos with professional quality light and color balance
100% non-destructive editing
Supports RAW, JPEG, TIFF and DNG formats
Change exposure without changing color and vice-versa

Gorgeous HD photo slideshows FotoMagico turns your pictures into a spellbinding story and presents it in high definition. Innovative text, transition and alignment tools ensure astonishing results. Burn your slideshow to DVD or Blu-ray Disc for easy viewing and sharing.

Turn pictures into a spellbinding stories and present them in stunning HD
iPhoto library integration
Export to Toast
Drag & drop slideshow authoring

The Standard for Disc Burning on the Mac
Drag, drop, burn Toast 10 is the easiest and fastest way to burn your music, video, photo and data files on to CD, DVD or Blu-ray Disc for both Mac and PC. Span large projects across multiple discs. Archive up to 50 GB on high capacity Blu-ray Discs.

Unleash your HD videos AVCHD Archive makes it one-click simple to back up an entire camera of HD video to disc and automatically keep a preview version on your Mac for easy browsing.

Smart folder synchronization Sync up folders bi-directionally--between multiple computers, network volumes, or external hard disks.

Easy search and fast retrieval Automatically catalog your discs as you burn--with photo thumbnails saved on your computer, you can easily preview the contents of your discs and find any file or photo without the disc in the drive.

Share on both Macs and PCs Create hybrid discs with content unique to the Mac or PC--including custom icons, background images, and discs that "autorun" on PCs.

Every file at your fingertips Toast's convenient Media Browser includes file browsing, data filters, Spotlight search, Aperture and iLife '08 library access.

Copy, Compress and Convert Everything
Copy discs with one click Create exact copies of CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs--including audio CDs*** with one click. Recover files from scratched and damaged discs while copying.

Every file at your fingertips Toast's convenient Media Browser includes file browsing, data filters, Spotlight search, Aperture and iLife '08 library access.

Custom DVD compilations Create custom DVD compilations with up to 4 hours of DVD video on a single disc. Choose the individual DVD movies, audio and languages you want, while maximizing available disc space and video quality.

Video copy & convert Save time with Batch DVD conversion. Compress multiple DVD-Video folders at once to fit on a single DVD. Or convert them for playback on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, BlackBerry devices, and more.

Video Quality Preview Ensure the video quality you've selected is optimal before kicking-off lengthy video conversions. Preview a short clip of your video at selected quality settings in just seconds.

File Recovery for Damaged Discs Don't risk losing vital data. Recover previously unreadable files from damaged discs and copy them onto a new disc along with a list of unrecoverable files. Some of the data is always better than none!

Expand Your MP3 Library
Audiobook CDs on your iPod Convert audiobook CDs complete with individual chapters and pause/resume support for easy playback on iPod, iPhone and other portable players

Digitize LPs and tapes Digitize and restore your LPs and tapes, without the pops, clicks and hisses. Then burn them to CD or DVD, or send to iTunes for syncing with your iPod and more.

Automatic music capture If your Mac can play it, you can record it. Capture any streaming Internet audio on your Mac. Split audio into tracks, automatically identify and tag them, and add to your iTunes library.

Name that tune automatically Unique audio fingerprinting technology identifies and tags unknown tracks by adding artist, title and genre information. Now you can enjoy the music rather than doing the typing.

Your Video, Movies & TV Shows Anytime, Anywhere
Enjoy Web video anywhere Save streaming web video from your favorite web sites and burn to DVD for viewing on your big-screen TV. Easily convert web video to other formats for playback on the portable device of your choice and enjoy it anywhere you go.

HD video on standard DVDs Easily import video from your AVCHD camcorder or other HD sources and create high-def DVD discs for playback on Blu-ray Disc players, including the PlayStation 3.*

Stream TV Shows Stream your TiVo and EyeTV recordings and other video files from your Mac to iPhone and iPod Touch over the Internet. Easily browse, sort, and search your TV shows. Toast will even notify you by email when new shows are ready for streaming.

Mac2TiVo Send standard and HD video from your Mac to your TiVo DVR for viewing on television. Publish folders full of video on your Mac and stream them on-the-fly to your DVR without lengthy video conversions.

Easily grab video highlights Extract video clips from your home DVD movies** and convert them to view and share on the playback device of your choice.

Striking DVD menus Choose from over 20 stunning new DVD and Blu-ray Disc menu styles for all occasions--in both full-screen and widescreen versions.

*HD video authoring functionality for DVD and Blu-ray Discs requires the purchase of High-Def/Blu-ray Disc Plug-In. **Does not copy encrypted or protected content. USE OF THIS SOFTWARE TO MAKE ILLEGAL COPIES OF MOVIES AND OTHER CONTENT IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED

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