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Printmaster Platinum 2.0 Not So Masterful


Oh, the joys of Windows 7. My American Greeting Card CreateACard Platinum 7 is not happy with Windows 7. It isn’t flat out incompatible, it just is erratic. Sometimes it works just fine and others, no so much. So I did a search and found a site that claimed to have evaluated greeting card software. They rated Printmaster Platinum as number one.

Well, I have to wonder if they actually looked at the software. First I was lured by the 50% off price at Staples. I should have guessed that if they were selling it at 50% off it was not the best seller. Next it took forever to install, hug, chug, I think I can, I think I can. Luckily I have two computers on my desk so I wasn’t dead in the water during installation.

Upon starting the software I discovered that their idea of greeting cards and that of my old reliable American Greeting Card Create are radically different. My MS Publisher 2003 has better greeting card options than this package. It also was slowwww! I mean really, really slow.  It takes 56 seconds from when you click on the icon to open the program until the program actually opens. It took 20 seconds to open a greeting card template. That may seem like nit picking but for example it takes my old CreateACard software 5 seconds to open and less than 10 seconds to open a full fledge greeting card with message, not just a “start here” template and it isn't suppose to be Windows 7 compatible.

Bottom line, I bought a swiss army knife, do everything not so well, instead of a software package that specifically does greeting cards well. My bad! I can’t blame it on anyone else. I’d like to. I called Staples and got the old “there is NO return on software” policy. So I am stuck with a software package that claims to be Windows 7 compatible but is really, really slow and claims to have good greeting cards, not really.

So if you are looking for something to generate nice greeting cards, I can not recommend Printmaster Platinum. For me, I’m going to continue to use my erratic, out of date, old CreateACard software that is still better than my supposedly up to date new software.

I don't know that the Hallmark Card Studio Deluxe works any better but I'm guessing it can't be any worse.

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