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After 19 years in the IT industry I thought I knew how to pick good software... ACT! seemed safe enough; it's been around forever so they *must* have worked the bugs out, right? Very professional packaging, sold everywhere, all the 'safety' signs are there...

Well I was wrong. Another review called ACT! 'snake oil' and I'd say that's pretty close to the mark.

The first thing I noticed was that the quality of the printed reports (phone lists was my main interest) was horrible - actually horrible to the point of being illegible and unusable. The marketing material rants about how you can print in collins-debden / filofax / etc formats though their wonderful templates but believe me, you'd be better off hiring a blind heroin addict to handwrite your address pages. It would be both cheaper and more legible.

Then there's the debacle over Windows Update - ACT is written so badly that when Windows Update did its thing, ACT had a hissy fit and self-destructed. ACT took weeks to do anything about it, and I lost many frustrating hours diagnosing and fixing (by the way, I used to work inside ITG - the division of Microsoft Tech Support that gives tech support to Microsoft internal staff, so it's not like I'm a newbie at this stuff).

(Also, by the way, the computer of interest is a brand-spanking new business-type Dell, with nothing on it but Windows XP, a good virus checker, and ACT.)

Then after fixing that and using for a couple of weeks the crashing began... then more crashing, then the 100% cpu hanging, then the strange inability to select 'calender' - ever. When I looked at the ACT! user forums the answer was clear - LOTS of users have LOTS of problems with ACT. I was not alone in having problems or being frustrated and feeling cheated of time and money.

ACT technical support staff are just blame-shifters. While reading the forums I read all sorts of nonsense. One support staffer told a customer 'I suspect your problem is that you have a 5400rpm hard drive' - this is CONTACT MANAGEMENT - Not magnetic resonance imaging of the centre of a neutron star! At Microsoft I ran a two Gigabyte SQL Server customer database on 5400rpm drives with a pentium 400 at the helm - a long long time ago so ANY computer today should EAT a small contact database alive. ACT like telling people they need supercomputers because the average joe doesn't realise just how simpe contact management is from an IT perspective and it gets the customer off the phone. That was the worst of the cop-outs I heard, but there were LOTS of others.

I've seen some bad code in my time, but I shudder to think what must be happening at ACT... To have this many problems at version 11, to have performance issues running 1990's software on 2009 computers, to be so sloppy in coding that ACT doesn't work with Data Execute Prevention and Windows Update (two critical Microsoft security features) and with bad tech support to boot...

This morning I uninstalled ACT and a sense of calm and happiness washed over me. I also feel wiser, like the time I got mugged on a train on which I'd foolishly sat too far from the guards compartment at night. This has been a lot like that experience actually, mildly expensive, fairly frustrating, and I won't make that mistake again.

My parent is a long time ACT! 2000 user, the upgrade to the ACT! 2009 Premium Edition seems to be a nightmare, in terms of program startup/running speed and stability.

Let me give you cuple example after just a few minutes of using and testing.

He have about 3000 contacts and thousands of groups in his old ACT! 2000 program database, and couple thousand to-do lists.

After conversion of the old 2000 database to the new 2009, the database size has increased about 10 times from 15MB to about 60MB with no new contents added.

The program with the Microsoft SQL express server is running hell slow on a Duo Core 2.0 GHZ machine with 2 GB of memory.

Changing a layout of the program (back and forth from only 2 option available, whcih is 800x600 or 1024x768, none is optimized for today's widescreen LCD monitors.) takes about 5 minutes. During the layout change, the program simply would just freeze untill 5 minutes later the layout change is finished.

Starting the ACT! 2009 Premium Edition takes at least 1 min and 30 seconds for it to load only 3000 contacts and 3000 to-dos. The original ACT! 2000? it takes it 0.5 seconds. Wow, what a difference. I don't understand how could they make a great program so S***ty garbage in just 9 years.

Open anything with over 1000 entries (Contacts, Groups, Tasks/To-do) takes over 30 seconds on the initial click, and 5 secons thereafter.

Selecting 2000 entries takes over 1 minutes, and completeing them by clearing them takes about 2-3 minutes......

This is nightmare, I'm suggesting my parent to switch back to ACT! 2000 till he finds a better CRM software.