Look, I'm not a super seasoned video editor. But I've worked with Windows movie maker a LOT, which is FREE, and also am a computer programmer, and that ought to count for something. First of all from a service point of view, add this company to the list of the many who think think it's OK to make you jump through 10 hoops to get some technical questions answered. At this price, you ought to be able to call and speak to someone and get some intelligent feedback. But getting down to the meat of the matter, I have a pretty modern and fast machine, and have used enough multimedia software to know sluggish programming. I can't tell you how many times I thought this program was locked up, only to realize it was having trouble catching up to my simple requests. And ear in mind that all I had done at this point was imported a few short AVI clips, one JPG, and one short background audio clip, and was attempting some simple splits, insertions, and transitions. Some things went smoothly and instinctively, but a lot os simple edits or splits were a challenge too. Overall the whole environment made it very hard to believe I wasn't working with a version 1 or 2. You know that feeling of wondering if anyone actually worked with the program and gave any feedback to the programmers? You'll feel that way a LOT with Power Director. Not to mention that once you get lost in the "gray area" of not knowing whether the machine is locked up or just God awful slow, it's pretty darn easy to crash the program! Hey wasn't that kind of the way the early versions of Windows "Movie Maker" worked? Also, for a program that boasts being able to help you mix in audio tracks with som many options, my opinion is that those features are either really weak, or really well hidden. Oh yeah... and this is one of those programs that will try to sneak Quicktime into your system whether or not you want it. What else? the "Capture" screen activated my TV/Multimedia card, and would not let me turn it off, except by exiting the program and disabling it elsewhere. Anyway, it might work for some with some very simple tasks, but most of those tasks are things you likely could have handled with a free program. So do yourself a favor... if you're looking for something better and more powerful than your free-ware, this will be a very frustrating choice that will leave you very glad they included one important feature: a clean UNINSTALL! (then again, time will tell on that one).