TurboTax Tax Organizer 2002

Rating:
Summary: not much better than a shoebox
Review: Don't be fooled. This isn't software, it isn't a book of tax advice, it may not be worth what you pay for it. This is literally a folder with a velcro seal and several tabbed sections inside for you to store tax receipts and other records. Also included in the package is a very brief pamphlet of common tax tips. There are also small labels you can attach to each of the tabbed sections.
In most respects, this product is nothing more than manilla folders with a handful of labels you can apply yourself. The tax guide pamphlet is way too small to be of much use to anyone who has done their own personal income taxes once before. If you want tax advice or tips, buy one of the books specifically written for that, or get the free publications published by the IRS which are available online and often included in most "deluxe" tax preparation software.
The folder and the tabbed sections are plastic coated but other than that it is hard to find much value-added from this product over your own folders and/or shoebox.

Rating:
Summary: Tax Organizer for 2002
Review: I found this tool highly useful to pull together and organize all of my tax information. It's straightforward to use and will help those who are helpless.

Rating:
Summary: Does THIS TurboTax/Intuit product ALSO contain C-Dilla ?
Review: Intuit Turbotax 2002 included a non-optional program called "C-Dilla". That program was supposed to be a DRM (Digital Rights Management -- anti-piracy) program, but is a particularly nasty form of spyware / malware that may be difficult or impossibel to remove from your system.

Before considering TurboTax, make a strong effort to find out if C-Dilla is no longer part of the TurboTax program(s), and that it is not a part of this "TurboTax Organizer".

In the 2002 version of TurboTax, a great protest rose up from prominent computer-industry magazines and users, which led to Intuit/TurboTax's somewhat apologizing for C-Dilla, and offering a program that uninstalled C-Dilla after you'd uninstalled TurboTax 2002. (The original uninstall program that came with TurboTax 2002 didn't remove C-Dilla.)

Why dislike C-Dilla ? Here's why:
If I had known in advance that this program contains CDilla spyware / malware, I would not have bought it. I ordered the product already... but I guarantee it will make a quick trip to the trash-bin UNOPENED.

For those of you who don't know what CDilla is:
It's spyware, which means it reports across the internet to let the mfr. know if you're making extra copies. It's also malware, because it interferes with your CD copying... not just preventing certain copyrighted CDs from being copied (OK, OK) but also just plain preventing your CD burner from copying random CDs properly...whether there's a legitimate reason for preventing that copy or not.

CDilla sets itself up on an undeclared, self-created partition on your hard disk. Yes, that means it goes in and changes your partition table !!! For some users, that's going to be a real problems, because monkeying with the partition table is NOT a good idea...particularly if you have several partitions, dedicated to several flavors of operating system (Windows and Linux, for example... with a LiLo-type partition to provide you with a boot-time menu so you can choose which operating system to boot).

Here's a quote from extremetech.com. (ExtremeTech and its sister publication PC Magazine are industry leaders. You have probably heard of their most famous writer, John C. Dvorak.) This is from one of many articles there about C-Dilla, particularly C-Dilla on Intuit's TurboTax software. (Intuit-TurboTax-2002's version of C-Dilla wasn't different from any other version of C-Dilla. It just got alot of attention because TurboTax *was* very popular software until C-Dilla became a part of it.)

From the article:
"Likely the biggest problem users have expressed, is the level at which the TurboTax licensing agreement is managed and protected with the SafeCast/C-Dilla technology. People believe C-Dilla infiltrates their system in a very insidious manner, and uses memory and resources even when TurboTax is not loaded. And some believe it has caused them serious compatibility problems with non-related CD writing operations. (PC Magazine and ExtremeTech will be conducting some tests next week to see if we can duplicate some of these problems). [....] or your customers still looking to exit TurboTax for good, the uninstaller at this link now fully removes components of SafeCast/C-Dilla that were previously mostly impossible to remove."

You can use the search engine at extremetech.com to find this article and related C-Dilla articles, and the very interesting discussions about C-Dilla, what it does, why folks dislike it intensely, etc. etc.

In short, C-Dilla is an extremely strong reason for any PC user to avoid this product. Buy something else instead. If you're planning on using this product at work, forget it... your Info Technology manager will have a cow if he/she knows that you're installing destructive trojan/spyware (C-Dilla) on the company PCs. If you've already installed this software on a PC at work, let your IT manager know IMMEDIATELY, so he/she can take whatever steps are possible to remove C-Dilla.

Rating:
Summary: Does THIS TurboTax/Intuit product ALSO contain C-Dilla ?
Review: Intuit Turbotax 2002 included a non-optional program called "C-Dilla". That program was supposed to be a DRM (Digital Rights Management -- anti-piracy) program, but is a particularly nasty form of spyware / malware that may be difficult or impossibel to remove from your system.

Before considering TurboTax, make a strong effort to find out if C-Dilla is no longer part of the TurboTax program(s), and that it is not a part of this "TurboTax Organizer".

In the 2002 version of TurboTax, a great protest rose up from prominent computer-industry magazines and users, which led to Intuit/TurboTax's somewhat apologizing for C-Dilla, and offering a program that uninstalled C-Dilla after you'd uninstalled TurboTax 2002. (The original uninstall program that came with TurboTax 2002 didn't remove C-Dilla.)

Why dislike C-Dilla ? Here's why:
If I had known in advance that this program contains CDilla spyware / malware, I would not have bought it. I ordered the product already... but I guarantee it will make a quick trip to the trash-bin UNOPENED.

For those of you who don't know what CDilla is:
It's spyware, which means it reports across the internet to let the mfr. know if you're making extra copies. It's also malware, because it interferes with your CD copying... not just preventing certain copyrighted CDs from being copied (OK, OK) but also just plain preventing your CD burner from copying random CDs properly...whether there's a legitimate reason for preventing that copy or not.

CDilla sets itself up on an undeclared, self-created partition on your hard disk. Yes, that means it goes in and changes your partition table !!! For some users, that's going to be a real problems, because monkeying with the partition table is NOT a good idea...particularly if you have several partitions, dedicated to several flavors of operating system (Windows and Linux, for example... with a LiLo-type partition to provide you with a boot-time menu so you can choose which operating system to boot).

Here's a quote from extremetech.com. (ExtremeTech and its sister publication PC Magazine are industry leaders. You have probably heard of their most famous writer, John C. Dvorak.) This is from one of many articles there about C-Dilla, particularly C-Dilla on Intuit's TurboTax software. (Intuit-TurboTax-2002's version of C-Dilla wasn't different from any other version of C-Dilla. It just got alot of attention because TurboTax *was* very popular software until C-Dilla became a part of it.)

From the article:
"Likely the biggest problem users have expressed, is the level at which the TurboTax licensing agreement is managed and protected with the SafeCast/C-Dilla technology. People believe C-Dilla infiltrates their system in a very insidious manner, and uses memory and resources even when TurboTax is not loaded. And some believe it has caused them serious compatibility problems with non-related CD writing operations. (PC Magazine and ExtremeTech will be conducting some tests next week to see if we can duplicate some of these problems). [....] or your customers still looking to exit TurboTax for good, the uninstaller at this link now fully removes components of SafeCast/C-Dilla that were previously mostly impossible to remove."

You can use the search engine at extremetech.com to find this article and related C-Dilla articles, and the very interesting discussions about C-Dilla, what it does, why folks dislike it intensely, etc. etc.

In short, C-Dilla is an extremely strong reason for any PC user to avoid this product. Buy something else instead. If you're planning on using this product at work, forget it... your Info Technology manager will have a cow if he/she knows that you're installing destructive trojan/spyware (C-Dilla) on the company PCs. If you've already installed this software on a PC at work, let your IT manager know IMMEDIATELY, so he/she can take whatever steps are possible to remove C-Dilla.

Rating:
Summary: Does THIS TurboTax/Intuit product ALSO contain C-Dilla ?
Review: Intuit Turbotax 2002 included a non-optional program called "C-Dilla". That program was supposed to be a DRM (Digital Rights Management -- anti-piracy) program, but is a particularly nasty form of spyware / malware that may be difficult or impossibel to remove from your system.

Before considering TurboTax, make a strong effort to find out if C-Dilla is no longer part of the TurboTax program(s), and that it is not a part of this "TurboTax Organizer".

In the 2002 version of TurboTax, a great protest rose up from prominent computer-industry magazines and users, which led to Intuit/TurboTax's somewhat apologizing for C-Dilla, and offering a program that uninstalled C-Dilla after you'd uninstalled TurboTax 2002. (The original uninstall program that came with TurboTax 2002 didn't remove C-Dilla.)

Why dislike C-Dilla ? Here's why:
If I had known in advance that this program contains CDilla spyware / malware, I would not have bought it. I ordered the product already... but I guarantee it will make a quick trip to the trash-bin UNOPENED.

For those of you who don't know what CDilla is:
It's spyware, which means it reports across the internet to let the mfr. know if you're making extra copies. It's also malware, because it interferes with your CD copying... not just preventing certain copyrighted CDs from being copied (OK, OK) but also just plain preventing your CD burner from copying random CDs properly...whether there's a legitimate reason for preventing that copy or not.

CDilla sets itself up on an undeclared, self-created partition on your hard disk. Yes, that means it goes in and changes your partition table !!! For some users, that's going to be a real problems, because monkeying with the partition table is NOT a good idea...particularly if you have several partitions, dedicated to several flavors of operating system (Windows and Linux, for example... with a LiLo-type partition to provide you with a boot-time menu so you can choose which operating system to boot).

Here's a quote from extremetech.com. (ExtremeTech and its sister publication PC Magazine are industry leaders. You have probably heard of their most famous writer, John C. Dvorak.) This is from one of many articles there about C-Dilla, particularly C-Dilla on Intuit's TurboTax software. (Intuit-TurboTax-2002's version of C-Dilla wasn't different from any other version of C-Dilla. It just got alot of attention because TurboTax *was* very popular software until C-Dilla became a part of it.)

From the article:
"Likely the biggest problem users have expressed, is the level at which the TurboTax licensing agreement is managed and protected with the SafeCast/C-Dilla technology. People believe C-Dilla infiltrates their system in a very insidious manner, and uses memory and resources even when TurboTax is not loaded. And some believe it has caused them serious compatibility problems with non-related CD writing operations. (PC Magazine and ExtremeTech will be conducting some tests next week to see if we can duplicate some of these problems). [....] or your customers still looking to exit TurboTax for good, the uninstaller at this link now fully removes components of SafeCast/C-Dilla that were previously mostly impossible to remove."

You can use the search engine at extremetech.com to find this article and related C-Dilla articles, and the very interesting discussions about C-Dilla, what it does, why folks dislike it intensely, etc. etc.

In short, C-Dilla is an extremely strong reason for any PC user to avoid this product. Buy something else instead. If you're planning on using this product at work, forget it... your Info Technology manager will have a cow if he/she knows that you're installing destructive trojan/spyware (C-Dilla) on the company PCs. If you've already installed this software on a PC at work, let your IT manager know IMMEDIATELY, so he/she can take whatever steps are possible to remove C-Dilla.

Rating:
Summary: Misleading name, but it does help get paperwork straight
Review: OK, its an accordion file and they supply the labels. But for folks like me who keep all their receipts and other papers in one big messy bin, this accordion file is very useful. It helps you to get all the right papers sorted out, has neat little labels, and keep the papers together. You can pull just the papers you need out of that bin for tax time, and leave the rest in the bin for later.

And getting it for free, hey, I am not complaining!