Hot Products > Software

1000 Board and Puzzle Games (PC CD)

super value for money!!, 2008-08-06
1000 games on 2 discs-need i say more-hours of fun ahead-a great addition to a pc gamers collection!

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 16 Deluxe (PC)

Speedy typer thanks to Mavis Beacon, 2008-03-10
I have really learned form Mavis Beacon!!
I had a query if it was compatible with my computer so I contacted GSP customer suppert online and they got back to me really quickly and sufficiently. The product is Americanised but its not teaching you HOW to spell but HOW to type.(You should be able to figure the spelling bit out for yourself.) I would recommend this product to anyone wanting to learn how to type accurately and with speed.

Microsoft AutoRoute 2007 (PC)

I only wanted it for one thing - and it does it well, 2008-07-17
Having read the other reviews I was worried.

Very worried.

But I only wanted autoroute for one thing

I am on the road a lot, and I can import from an excel spreadsheet the details of my clients and they appear on the map screen! So I can plan journeys to reduce maileage and with fuel prices as high as they are that soon saves the cost of the software. I have nothing to add on any other comment, but this feature alone makes it a must have.

Greeting Card Factory Deluxe 6 & Seasons (PC)

Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy

Castle Malloy, 2008-10-30
This is a point and click adventure. Number 19 in the Nancy Drew series by Her Interactive. It's target audience is primarily young females. There is no violence and no cussing in the game. It is clean.

The controls worked well, it's all mouse-driven.

The story is the weakest part of the game. Nancy flies over to Ireland, drives a hire car to the Castle then proceeds to solve the mystery on the same night! There are other improbables, but it's impossible to mention them without giving away spoilers.

The puzzles were not all well integrated into the story. Mostly doable, some were difficult at least at the senior level. I liked the sheep (fun) and the flying (unusual). Mini games (to earn money) are doll positioning, dart playing, spot the difference, drumming and bartending. The latter is a bit iffy with the target audience in mind. Some of the puzzles were merely tedious.

Graphics are well done, but dark and gloomy throughout. The available ventures were sparse. Castle consists of library, nursery (covered in dust and cobwebs), great hall (with end wall blown out), enterance gate and later a tower. The Screaming Banshee Inn is one room, mini games, and behind the bar. The grounds have roughly half a dozen points of interest. In previous ND games there were interesting rooms to explore to relieve the pressure of puzzling out the problems. In this game there was little relief.

Sounds were well done, I liked the background music which was cheerful in contrast to the gloomy graphics.

Characters within the game were sparse too. Bride, Groom, would-be best man, castle servant. Meaningful conversations were few and far between. The Irish get a bad press.

Overall verdict. Only an average game. Not near the best in the ND series. Fans of the series will buy, but casual players are best advised to choose the previous game.

Rome Anthology (PC DVD)

Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate

Poor customer support & upgrades, 2008-11-17
Just a quick warning about PSP...

I purchased Paint Shop Pro X2 directly from Corel recently. Their customer support stinks (their website sent me the wrong software, and they refused to believe I'd clicked on the correct button).

Even worse, a week later, this new "Ultimate" version was released, and the price to Upgrade was almost the same as buying a new copy.

Poor poor poor..

Good software, very slow to start up sometimes (about 30 seconds), so I still use Paint Shop Pro v7 when I need to make a quick change, and very poor support.

Windows Vista, Home Premium Edition with Service Pack 1 (PC)

Decent OS; I have no desire to switch, 2008-10-17
Frankly, I love Vista. While the minimum system requirements are higher than XP, they are by no means unreasonable, and the result is an OS that's easily as fast as Linux or OS X, and one that is much better laid out as well.

Small touches abound. The start menu has been condensed into one box instead of opening a potentially gigantic list of programs, and discrete info and link boxes are peppered throughout, making it infinitely easier to slip from one related task to another. A particularly nice touch is that the address bar showing your folder location includes a drop down arrow for every folder you've had to go through to reach it, with a list of all the folders contained within them, meaning that you can navigate back through into another folder with ease. It is much like the layout of OS X's folders in that respect, yet compresses it into a much more compact and just as functional design.

Functionality is a mixed bag, but usually for good reason; some old programs will find themselves unable to run on Vista's version of their dependencies, but the vast majority of programs can be made to run with compatibility mode. By this point Vista compatible drivers are standard, and shouldn't present a problem at all. Moreover, troubleshooting problems is vastly improved; with wireless problems in particular, XP was notorious for clamming up as to why it was refusing to work, resulting in a protracted search for a solution. At worst Vista is able to angle in on the general area of the problem, and at best will offer a direct fix. It's a hell of a lot better than the previous Windows favourite, 'dump everything and start over'.

Perhaps I'm simply used to the old Windows problems, but Vista hasn't presented any particular problem for me. Viruses have been very rare, crashes infrequent and mysterious errors few and easily solved, usually by Vista itself. The OS hasn't been a barrier to user accessibility as previous Windows versions have been, and the streamlined design works like a dream. And as always, the sheer popularity of Windows means that it comes out top for overall compatibility with the biggest range of file formats, software and hardware, from the most common to the most obscure.

Be warned: User Account Control is the most horrible invention known to man, comprising a 'security feature' that essentially asks you if you want to execute the program you've just clicked on, every single time you open it. You WILL learn to just click through it automatically, rendering it useless, and you WILL hate it. Make sure the first thing you do before anything else is to head into Control Panel and turn it off. Otherwise, I'm happy to say that Vista is an excellent OS, much better than XP and a perfectly acceptable contender to both OS X and Linux. It depends what your want from your machine; nonetheless, it would be a mistake to overlook Vista as being another buggy version of Windows.

TuneUp Utilities 2008 (PC)

It works., 2008-11-09
Although there's not much this program can do that any windows poweruser could accomplish without it, who wants to spend time messing about with registry settings and so on when this can do it for you? This is a deceptivly simple program that works well - it speeds up your PC, helps you find all those forgotten 4gig movie files that are clogging up your hardrive and just generally cleans things out and speeds things up.

I tried this out on my old desktop PC on which the windows installation had bloated out to some 40gig, boot times were glacial, and the disk had never been defragmented in some 4 years or so. So fragged in fact that XPs own defragger repeatedly crashed trying to fix it. A few hours of letting TUP2008 do it's thing and minutes were knocked off the time it took the PC to start, I'd cleared some 10gig of diskspace and the whole machine was noticably faster and more responsive.

I've better things to do with my time than mess about in hidden menus, tweaking the settings of windows - it's worth my time to buy this to do the tedious work for me, and it works extremely well. First class.

Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (PC)