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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 112 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
425 of 471 found the following review helpful:
 Total Dissapointment if you have a Mac Mar 05, 2005
By C. L. Camacho
When I saw the announcement I got excited, and purchased it right away because I had been using the excellent Kid Pix 3X developed by MacKiev, and I thought this will be even better. Once I installed it, I was terribly dissapointed with the quality of the graphics, cursors and other user interface elements. I did some research and found out that Broderbund licenses the Kidpix title to two different companies one the maker of this version Riverdeep and the other Mackiev. Mackiev has spent quite a bit of resources developing their version and it shows in the quality of their work. If you have Mac OSX you should buy KidPix 3X available at the Mac Store. It is more expensive but in this case you definetely get what you pay for. KidPix 3X not only runs on OSX but it is integrated with the ILife applications among many other incredible features. They won a best of show award on the MacWorld 2004 for their application.
283 of 328 found the following review helpful:
Don't buy this if you have a mac Feb 22, 2005
By P. Kingsley
I bought this because it is finally OS X native. Installed KPD4 in my account, but when my daughter opens KPD4 in her account, it will not save, no permission. Broderbund will not support, they redirect to encoreusa. Encoreusa has no support on their site for this product. Not covered in their knowledgebase, or forums. And they will not support by phone. No reponse to e-mails except form letters with no followup. There are permissions problems generated by this product, and they are unresolved.
Just don't buy KPD4 until it is supported.
41 of 44 found the following review helpful:
 Entertains the grandkids for hours Aug 14, 2006
By Donna R
I recently purchased two copies of this program, and am about to purchase two more for the homes of grandchildren and friends. The options for playing with the program seem to be endless. It encourages the young children to learn mouse skills, and how to operate a computer program while having LOTS of fun in creativity. Our 4 year old grandkids and 10 year olds and their friends spend many hours using this program and just having fun with it.
It's best if an adult can help the child know what options are available to them in the program. Very young children can use the program in a basic manner, and older children can learn the finer skills.
It's best to change the resolution on your monitor to 800 x 600 (75HZ refresh rate) BEFORE opening the program. That will open the program FULL SCREEN, instead of smaller if your resolution is normally set higher than 800 x 600.
19 of 19 found the following review helpful:
Buggy program, zero support = refund request Nov 19, 2007
By T. Butler
I bought this for my son, since it is ostensibly the same program they use in his kindergarten. Unfortunately I made the mistake of buying the electronic download version, which requires a horrid program called appstream. The first problem I have is that this appstream program isn't just for the download, it installs itself to always be running, and is required to be running to use the Kid Pix application. Further, it also must be able to connect to the internet each time you want to use the program, so it is impossible to use it on a laptop in disconnected mode. This restriction alone (which is not mentioned during the purchasing process) was enough to make me decide to return it for the "normal" version on a CD.
But then I found that I could not even use the program. When I launch it, I find that the Kid Pix executable completely saturates the CPU on my fairly fast laptop, and takes more than 5 minutes to fully load. And when it does finally come up, it has a constant CPU load of 85-95% for just this one executable, which makes it unusable. So I sent a simple support request to Broderbund, which was to ask them if it was a known issue, and was I likely to see the same thing with the version on CD. (In essence, asking if it was the very same program on CD.)
I won't go into the screen resolution issue that others describe, but of course I was affected by that as well. As it was running on a laptop, changing to a non-native resolution isn't an option. This will be true for LCD monitors as well, where non-native resolutions have horrible viewability. The is presumably because this application has an archaic interface based on fixed size bitmaps, and they can neither scale their user interface nor display it in a window.
What I got back was a useless response telling me to defragment my hard disk. Clearly they aren't willing to support this product. Perhaps its modest level of quality and low price point make real support not cost effective. Nonetheless, I'm off to find a better alternative for my son. For now he can go "old school" and use crayons. :-)
UPDATE: And to top off all of that, I just got a solicitation call based on my registration information I had provided.
23 of 24 found the following review helpful:
Product does not support Vista. Customer No Service gave unhelpful response to queries Sep 17, 2007
By John Gerken
It's hard to believe that anyone selling home Windows software wouldn't support Windows Vista in some shape or form, but for Encore's (Broderbund) KidPix 4 this appears to be the case. Oh it installs, but doesn't run in full screen mode that allows it to be usable by any young kid like version 3 did under XP. Your only choice is to manually set your screen resolution to 800x600 and then reset it when you're finished.
An e-mail to Encore support simply stated: "Unfortunately this program is not supported on Microsoft's New operating system Windows Vista. If it is still within the time frame of a refund please follow the instructions below." No statement about planned support, no work-around, just an offer to refund if I'd just purchased it. None of this is helpful to me. We have a new PC with Vista on it. My kids need KidPix to do some of their school work projects since that is the software package they are required to use at school.
So if you have a new PC with Vista, or if you are considering getting a new machine and your kids use this software package, beware, because you'll get no help from Encore or Broderbund to get it working.
See all 112 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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