illustrator

Adobe Illustrator CS4 Upgrade
$199.00
Half the price and we did not have to buy the original just an update.

Adobe Illustrator CS4 Classroom in a Book
$54.99
The book, had no bents, no tore pages, no missing pages, and the spine was in fine condition! The book was overall, in a complete new like condition :)

The Shiping on right on time. The box helded the book securely, undamged, and clean!

Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book (Book & CD-ROM)
$54.99
I never received the item. the book may be great but the seller or method of delivery is very flawed

Adobe Illustrator CS4
$599.00
I went out and bought the Adobe CS4 Design Standard software package, luckily with a educational discount, for my university studies of graphic design. While it is not required per say, in order to get our projects done (out of class time) it is a must. Overall the Illustrator program works great for work on class projects, but seems to have some bugs on the PC.

For instance in the months of use, with over 72 hours in class, on a Mac I have never had a problem with the settings file becoming corrupt; however, on almost every program start on my PC it claims my settings have become corrupt and then resets them. This is a pain as I have to reset my settings every-time to work, and even if I leave the default settings alone and reload the software it will be corrupt again.. I have discovered many others with this same problem on the Adobe forum and no help, patch, or update is available or planned. It looks to be a problem that is many years old as well, which truly is saddening. Of the suggestions from users nothing works to stop the issue, and a clean install of the program with or without the updates does not help.

Then there are other more minor issues as well that stand out. One of which is when using the tools such as the brush or the pencil. Once I begin working with either of them the icon pointer will become locked/frozen in a cursor state. The only way to resolve the problem is to change to precision cursor (Caps Lock), often pressing it numerous times until it responds, and then press once again to return to the normal cursor. Only then will the tool cursor change as needed while using it, until it does it again. The other issues are less frequent so I will save the typing space.

The Adobe Illustrator seems to have no equal, but it still needs work to iron out the numerous problems on the PC. I can happy report I have not experienced any problems using my other Adobe CS4 programs on my PC (fingers crossed) such as Acrobat, Indesign, or Photoshop; however, with the numerous frustrations with Illustrator and the costs of the software I will be looking for alternatives when I complete my classes and can use whatever I prefer.