The nice thing about mass-market commercial software is that I can purchase it at a small fraction of the cost to develop it myself, which I would never do because I don’t have the time. Unfortunately, home-user mass-market software seems to lack quality. Here are some that I recommend against.

• Greeting Card Factory. When I opened the package, I discovered that the software shipped on about six separate CDs! I purchased the software in 2007 — an enlightened age where most people have DVD drives. I’m impatient, and disliked having to play disk jockey to install the software. Once installed, I discovered that it’s cumbersome to use — too much clicking with the mouse required to get the job done. There’s no good preview of card greeting messages in the template browser, so I have to load each one in, click through the buttons to see the message, and then start all over again to find an appropriate card. It sure is a waste of time. The best greeting card software I’ve used was American Greetings, but that version was designed years ago and required inserting CDs to load some of the cards. Hallmark’s software was the most polished, robust, and least annoying, but I liked the quality of cards from American Greetings better.

UPDATE: There is a good way to preview greeting card messages in the template browser — you have to increase the zoom level to the maximum, and additional preview controls become visible.

• Symantec and McAffe AntiVirus. They slow down a computer too much (by 20% or more!). Anything that annoys my grandmother about activation is too much of a hassle. Switch to AVG Free. I run Vista with an unprivileged account, and so far, I haven’t needed AV. I ran AVG Free on Windows XP for several years, and never got a virus — because I didn’t download and install random software — and because my user account didn’t have administrative privileges.

There’s hardware to avoid as well:

• Kodak printers. I decided to give a Kodak printer a try because of the promise of cheaper ink. The printer has been a constant hassle ever since we purchased it. Just tonight, even after selecting the best print quality, it still printed every other line as faded and smudgy. My wife seems to know the ritual to make it print better, but she’s not here at the moment. Avoid Kodak printers at all costs. Go with an Epson or an HP — they provide quality results. If a laser printer fits your needs, they’re usually more reliable than an inkjet printer.

When our household bought a Vista laptop, I migrated our install of Quicken 2002 to the new computer. My wife and I have separte accounts, and we update the checkbook separately. When she went to balance the checkbook, she noticed that my entries were missing.

On further investigation, it turns out that when I run Quicken, I can see my entries, but not hers. When she runs Quicken, she sees her entries, but not mine. It appeared that we are using two different databases. Quicken 2002 is supposed to write its files to the c:\Program Files\QUICKENW directory. I had given each of our non-Admin users access rights to write to that directory. I installed Process Explorer so that I could see what files Quicken had open, and their location. It turns out that Quicken was writing its files to C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\QUICKENW. Why was it doing that? What is this VirtualStore thing?

Apparently, Windows Vista enforces security policy and doesn’t allow applications to write to C:\Program Files. Instead, it redirects badly behaved applications, like Quicken 2002, to write files to a per-user VirtualStore directory, and it does this silently (for backwards compatibility). I wish Vista had simply denied write access to Quicken, so I would have known that there was a problem early on, before getting into this mess of having two diverging checkbook databases. I like the additional security that Vista enforces, but it’s inconvenient in subtle and exasperating ways.

Now I need to figure out how to merge our separate copies of the checkbook.

Update: I never did merge the two quicken databases.