This year it took 2 1/2 hours for TurboTax to install on my computer.

It requires .NET 3.5 SP2, and perhaps part of the installation time was installing updates for that.

OMG — 2 1/2 hours!!!

I’ve never like TurboTax compared to TaxCut, but since I have been using Quicken, it is very quick to transfer data from Quicken to TurboTax.

I’m currently a Linux user, though (I only use Quicken and TurboTax in a Windows virtual machine) so am swtiching to GnuCash. With luck this is my last year using Intuit products!

Since 2006, we’ve been successfully using TurboTax to file our complex income taxes (with 2 or 3 small businesses).

I am writing to warn you that today I just lost 4 long days of 2009 tax data I’d entered while I was on the phone with a TurboTax staff person who was guiding me through on “Live Look”, where she can see my desktop and every icon on it and the movements of my cursor. The reason that I called her is that the total of our charitable donations did not match the total in the summary – off by thousands of dollars, and I couldn’t find the cause of the difference.

In the midst of this conversation, TurboTax froze, crashed, wiping out all my work. I showed the gal (since she could view our desktop on her computer) how I could still open and close any other icon on my desktop when she said it was the fault of my computer, proving that it was Turbo, not my computer that crashed. She told me to close Turbo and put it in the trash, and empty the trash. I asked if she had a back-up copy of our 2009 tax file that she could send to me, since I was nearly done with it, and she assured me she did and not to worry about losing our copy here. She was dead wrong, and we’re back to zero. I bawled.

This gal’s supervisor wasn’t helpful either, and both gals admitted that there have been a lot of crashes and people losing data this year on Turbo, worse than in previous years, and that “their software staff is working on it.” It is small consolation that we can take this disc back to Costco for a refund. I wish I could sue.

I don’t know what the alternative is – hate to fork out the dough for an accountant, but may have to.

Be careful, and follow the supervisor’s advice if you do use Turbo – save your data on a disc often, and if you have to rely entirely on that, you obviously couldn’t email your federal return.

Lucille

At this pont we wonder if these “errors” were errors at all?… I mean someone has to pay for all these stimulus plans? Stealing an extra $1k or $2k from each working/honest tax payer each year could help out dont you think?

I guess it all comes down to how complicated your return is. I itemize and work in two states, but other than that my returns aren’t all that complicated. It does irk me that I spend all year tracking my charitable deductions on a spreadsheet, then I have to re-enter all that data, even though I have the grand total right in front of me. Is TurboTax any smarter about this?

I’ve stayed away from TaxAct and other online-only programs because I am very leery of posting my tax info on a company’s Web site. They may be as honest as the day is long, but I am very skeptical about Web security based on some of the consumer identity theft disasters we’ve seen in the past few years.

There are some nice things about TaxCut and you may want to give it a try if you want to save a little. But, for me, I’ve wasted too much time on TaxCut already.