FastStone is the new way
I’ve been an ACDSee fan since version 1. It was free. It was the fastest and coolest image viewer available. It was the first to implement scroll wheel image browsing. Then they started charging money. A lot. Around version 5 the software turned into crap except for the original image rendering engine. Around version 7 it improved and I’ve actually paid for versions 7 and 8. Mind you they’re not offering free upgrades like you would think. Upgrades are around $30.
Today I figured I need something better viewer then Picasa or Vista’s built-in image viewer and discovered that we’re up to version 9 now. Woohoo!! It must be fully compatible with Vista!!! Right?!? Riiiiiightt…. The thing has “C:\Documents and Settings” showing up in its folder explorer (hardcoded?!?! come on!!). And I wasn’t even able to navigate to C:\Users\username\Pictures (new setup in Vista).. so now this brand new, shiny piece of software is absolutely useless. You’d think that after charging so much money and Vista pre-release versions being available for months, they’d have resources available to update their software in time? Everyone else has…
After sending them a pretty feedback, decided to go back to FastStone, fast, free image viewer. Last I tried this was at least a year ago… Just downloaded the latest beta which came down over my phone connection and installed faster then I wrote feedback to previous guys. Come to find out it’s better and faster then ever! Full of features and speed - awesome. Perfect for my hi-res DSLR pics 
Good buy ACDSee, Hello FastStone!
