I ran an entire verbal practice exam with no issues.

Hmmm, my post vanished.

Repeat:
I'm sure you can do everything on it. My sis and her hubby are graphics people and they LOVE their Macs. I'm glad it works well for you. :)

Writing, on the other hand, can be done anywhere, even with a pad and pencil. And yes, I back up the crap out of everything!

[consumerist.com]

It is entirely possible that "the people selling books" are not quite so diligent, though.

For what it's worth: 1) the employee software for Washington Post (which owns Kaplan) is a palsied dinosaur, and it doesn't work on Macs, making entering attendance and timesheets a royal pain; 2) the ETS's official test-prep software (at gre [dot] org) doesn't work on Macs either (dunno about vista, don't care); and 3) as far as I know the online materials you get as an enrolled Kaplan student (including practice tests) still work fine on any OS.

It sounds like Abby was NOT an enrolled Kaplan student, but someone who bought the book and wanted to use the software -- not that this justifies the problems or anything. If someone asked me today I would recommend Kaplan's classes, but I probably wouldn't suggest buying the book. What Kaplan does well involves the classroom (or tutor-room) environment, where customer service is very personalized perforce: I'm not sure that they're as impressive a test-prep company if you take that away and just judge them on their materials.

just my .02

RR

It is entirely possible that "the people selling books" are not quite so diligent, though.

For what it's worth: 1) the employee software for Washington Post (which owns Kaplan) is a palsied dinosaur, and it doesn't work on Macs, making entering attendance and timesheets a royal pain; 2) the ETS's official test-prep software (at gre [dot] org) doesn't work on Macs either (dunno about vista, don't care); and 3) as far as I know the online materials you get as an enrolled Kaplan student (including practice tests) still work fine on any OS.

It sounds like Abby was NOT an enrolled Kaplan student, but someone who bought the book and wanted to use the software -- not that this justifies the problems or anything. If someone asked me today I would recommend Kaplan's classes, but I probably wouldn't suggest buying the book. What Kaplan does well involves the classroom (or tutor-room) environment, where customer service is very personalized perforce: I'm not sure that they're as impressive a test-prep company if you take that away and just judge them on their materials.

just my .02

RR

Just switched to Windows 7 from Vista two days ago because my laptop went toes-up, and so far I'm definitely impressed. Couple of minor WTF issues with the interface but far outweighed by the plusses (control-doubleclicking a folder opens it in a new window again!). And not every button has a damned icon on it anymore, much less cluttery.

Kaplan's software doesn't work in Vista. So what? It also doesn't work in OS X or Linux. It doesn't work in any 64-bit OS, including Windows XP x64.

All software is like this. Which is why you read the System Requirements.

If you want to run 'incompatible' software (and this applies generally), you can:
- google a patch/workaround
- run it in 'compatibility mode'
- run it in a virtual machine
- run it in an emulator

or run it on a different computer.

That being said, I teach for Kaplan and have to deal with this problem all the time. It absolutely blows.

@bobert:

This seems to be the only positive statement that a lot of Windows users can say about Macs. And while I agree with it, it's not complete. I also use the Macs for every other aspect of the biz. Coding, admin, management, finance, payroll, soundtrack composition, video editing, scheduling, the works. And having used Windows since the days of 3.1, I can honestly say, Macs changed my life. No more headaches, no more fixing problems constantly, no more hating my gear. There's not one single thing I miss about Windows. Zero. And anyone that says you can't use a Mac to run business, I can prove otherwise.

I also got my weekends back to myself. Every family member or friend I convert to Macs, I no longer have to spend my weekends over there fixing their busted Windows machines for them. The calls have stopped completely. The best overall repair for Windows, is not using it.

If you do graphics work, Mac is better. So far, though, just running my own crap and a few games, I haven't had a lick of trouble with Vista. It's on my laptop. I have XP on my desktop and at work. The only thing I don't like about Vista is the popup that says "Did you mean to open this program?" and you can turn that off.

corporate_guy, I thought your suggestion was going to work - until the program just froze up. But thanks for the help.

As an update, four days later I have still received no return call from Kaplan, so I am considering hiring a 5th grader to re-teach me fractions and reading comprehension. They'll work for candy bars and ice cream. So I will give up on Kaplan, taking my small personal victory over the snarky bs-ing customer service rep as proof of my passable intelligence.

Oh, and as a side note, I work in higher-ed admissions. Guess what test-prep company isn't getting any love from a top-ranked university next cycle? Way to go, Kaplan.

Strange I hade the GRE 2008 prep book from Kaplan and the CD worked fine with windows vista. There wasa nother CD from another book however that it did not work on vista but worked in Ubuntu perfectly.
As a sidenote the difference betweeen kaplan 2008 and 2009 prep text books is just the font, the questions and "strategies" are the same

From a technical stand point, Vista is great. You need a dual core system with, as you say, at least 2 gigs of memory. I'd also recommend SATA drives. I know they're standard now. I know you cannot buy a computer with IDE drives now. But a lot of XP systems use IDE drives. And those people who upgraded were the ones who had all the problems. Anyway...

My problem with Vista is from a usability stand point. Here's one simple example. In every other version of Windows if you want to change the balance to your speakers, e.g., make the left speaker a little louder. You could just double click on the little speaker icon in the system tray, the Volume Mixer would come up, and you'd be good-to-go.

Not so with Vista...

1. Right click on that speaker icon.
2. Choose Playback Devices.
3. Select your playback device.
4. Click Properties.
5. Choose the Levels tab.
6. Click the balance button.
7. Adjust the balance of your speakers.
8. Click "OK."
9. Click "OK."
10. Click "OK."
11. Click "OK.'

This is just one of many examples. In Microsoft's quest to make Vista easy to use by newbies (which by now are an incredibly small market), it made Vista completely frustrating for anyone who knows how to use a computer.

So most XP systems were not powerful enough to run Vista, which gave Vista a bad rap. But even when it did finally run, knowledgeable users were left pulling out their hair trying to get around the asinine interface. That gave it a worse rap.

@GershamDascylus: Right, because that kind of attitude is going to help anything...

No. It is not acceptable that companies are refusing to support the current M$ operating system, especially given that (a) it's been out for 2+ years, and (b) it's so similar to Windows 7 that they likely won't NEED to do another upgrade for another 2+ years. It's absurd.

-1 for blaming the OP and bashing M$ all in one fell swoop.

@MostlyHarmless: Actually just got myself a fairly high-powered Dell for myself as my undergrad graduation gift. 400 bucks, refurbished, the thing works like a charm. I'm pretty sure I'll still want a MacBook to play with once I'm making the big bucks, though...I had an iBook a few years back and LOVED it. I don't have the compatibility issue to worry about, and I'm not ashamed to say that I love Macs because they're just so damn pretty. Plus, I've already played with a developer copy of Snow Leopard and...OMG. Incredible.

@Ty Brown: Haha and it's so effective. I missed GuinevereRucker's comment and thought you were being serious. Then I snapped back to reality.

@GuinevereRucker: Windows 7 IS better. I do IT for a college campus of 25,000, and Vista makes me want to punch babies, even after they've fixed most of the issues. I have Windows 7 RC installed on my primary machine and I LOVE it...not as much as I love OSX. But it's up there.

@pirate_panda: It would make sense then, as there has been a strong push for 64 bit Vista on consumer machines, something that was never done in the days of XP.

As for the OS itself, Vista was nothing but good to me. It ran quite nicely on my run of the mill Latitude D630 w/ 2 GB of RAM, Intel X3100 graphics, and Core 2 Duo T7100 processor. People tended to run into problems when they didn't have enough memory. (2 GB is the sweet spot for mainstream use it seems, for Vista Home Premium and up, 1 GB for Home Basic)

I've moved on to the Windows 7 RC and it's even better, i'm quite pleased with it overall.

No, OS X's next iteration will not be any better. It will be tolerated because rich people will use it.

Now I see why trolling is so popular. It's so easy! You don't have to worry about backing up statements or being in touch with reality at all!

No, Winbloze 7 will not be any better. It will be tolerated because so many people will use it.

As for windows 7, it's basically Vista sp3. Better than vista and the driver support is there out of the box. I am using it now. It's better. Unlike xp and vista, windows 7 is actually going to work very well from day one.

@coren:
Ive grown to accept it, I would gladly take an XP with refreshed UI and DX 10 support though

@TechnoDestructo:
It feels more like it hits and misses each time for me I mean while 98, 2000, xp could be deemed successes, the Me's, NT's and Vista are just disgust worthy. I'm hoping 7 is a break in the trend even though what I've been hearing is too mixed for me to bite the bullet yet.

The saddest thing about this is probably that Kaplan has written an application that depends on 16-bit programs from the DOS era. Don't they make a ridiculous amount of money on this test prep business? Couldn't they afford to write a new Windows 95-era 32-bit app that would run just fine on every OS from Windows 95 up to Vista?

Windows 7 is looking like an NT4 to 2000 sort of change. It's an actual upgrade, with comparatively few headaches. Yup, Microsoft gets it right once every decade.

If this does not work you could install virtual pc [www.microsoft.com] and get the file called IE7-XPSP3.exe from [www.microsoft.com]

You can run a virtual machine with windows xp and IE7 for free(it expires aug 31, after that you have to redownload the image file and reinstall the app on it). You should be able to install the program and use it within the virtual machine.

The complaints about MCI drivers reported indicate the software relied on the MCI multimedia interface released with Win95. That makes sense - if it was shipped in 2004, they would have needed to support Win98 and WinME and so on. But multimedia has changes a LOT in the Windows world since then, and it's possible Vista doesn't really support MCI.

In that case, Kaplan's software would require a partial or complete rewrite, which would be time-consuming and, if they don't have qualified programmers in-house and used contractors, quite expensive - probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since they were moving to a web system anyway, it doubtless wasn't worth the bother. But in that case, they should again have warned people it wouldn't run on Vista.

Most likely they made the product and that was that. They probably aren't going to spend money updating the software to vista or above.

Kaplan is a large organization with numerous divisions and subsidiaries, and has acquired a number of firms in the last decade. I can well believe the teaching operation you work for indeed delivers value to its customers, while the people selling books through retail channels pay less attention to detail or customer value.

It's unfortunate that the book-with-CD doesn't list hardware or OS requirements (which would have eliminated the problem), that the books have numerous errors, and that money-back guarantees don't seem to extend to the CD-ROM. Those failings reflect badly on the entire organization.

This is the exact reason you should not use Kaplan. They are horrible and do not teach people how to take their test. Powerscore is great. They actually use people who help write their courses teach the courses and use people who know what is on the tests that they teach. When I was looking into LSAT test prep, I tried Kaplan. Complete waste of time and money. Then I found Powerscore, much cheaper than Kaplan and done much better. Kaplan has targeted people who think that the more they pay for their test, the better the prep.

Looks like you just excluded yourself from the group of people who are smart. My condolences.

Now, that's the teaching side of it. As a programmer (Kaplan is my job while I'm working my way through school), they should have had support for Vista a long time ago, and I'm rather surprised they don't. But like I said, I know from experience we are very student-oriented in the classroom. We're committed to excellence every step of the way, and we know it's the only way we'll survive.

Damnit, G.O.B.: Come on! Azeroth has dungeons that need to be explored. Won't you please think of the dungeons?

All kidding aside, this is pitiful and one would think that as soon as Vista became the only option on computers sold through retail they would have gotten off their asses and made the changes necessary for Vista.

I know it's likely already past the GRE test date, but I hope it'll help someone else with the same problem.

Vista is bloated and overly complex and breaks stuff on purpose, and is not backwards compatible with a lot of hardware it should be.

Agreed on their business model, hopefully this post will bring light to it and coerce them into at least making the product capable with Windows PC's build after 2007.

6 months later, I decided the wise thing to do would be to drop the mac idea for the time being and get a powerful dell machine for half the price. Though I must admit, as a professional software developer who develops software for windows, I wanted my home machine to be compatible with my work.

@coren: Take it from a guy who makes his living programming on windows platforms: Vista sucks.
I say that from a programmer point of view, not an office user point of view, ofcourse. For day to day activities, I have tweaked it enough so that it does not get in my way. In a year of using it at home, I have not had issues with it.

Though for some reason, my audio service dies every time google talk crashes, or when I bring it back from sleep. Being the enterprising programmer that I am, I wrote up a small utility in C# that i can fire off from Launchy, which restarts the service for me.

A layman who really would have no clue what to google for to start with would have been relegated to having to restart windows every time he wanted some audio on his machine.

If you look at the Amazon reviews, it seems like a lot of people bought it for Vista or Mac OS and felt they were deceived. It also seems like a lot of other people were dismayed with the outright errors in the materials.

Fortunately, my grad school days are decades in the past, but if somebody asked me about Kaplan, I'd tell them to stay away. Kaplan sounds like a bunch of fast-buck artists who don't really care about providing a quality product that's useful to their customers.

It also appears Kaplan has an all-encompassing disclaimer that allows the CD-ROM to be completely non-functional. Given that the 2010 edition has no CD-ROM, just links to a website (that also doesn't work), it seems almost certain Kaplan will never, ever ship a fix for Vista or Windows 7.

Sorry, OP, Kaplan ripped you off. They have your money, and you have a coaster. Your best bet is either to borrow an XP computer for the review, or buy a competitive product (and read the reviews first).

Granted, most people do think to check that. I remember running NT4 workstation at home and not all of the PC Games would run on it so you would have to check the box for supported O/S's.

Regardless, who doesn't want to at least offer Vista support with a 2009 product? Maybe they like incurring the customer-support expense involved by not supporting Vista.

But in the time using trillian I've never had any serious problems. I'm also using the pro version, so that might make a difference. It's got too many good features for me to change.

I think the girl whose 512 MB RAM computer it was installed it herself, so dumb of her. Thank goodness they've dropped the hardware requirements back down for Windows 7. You can run it on a netbook, with basically ALL features, including graphics, enabled. It's mind-boggling.

Maybe I'll give Trillian another shot, I gave it up cuz it was seriously buggy, but that was about 3+ years ago. Has it gotten better? I seem to remember issues with (a) away messages not staying put (which is my current complaint with Digsby), and (b) logon attempts after a connection reset getting me kicked off for 12+ hours because I wasn't there to keep it from trying 1398898798745 times a minute.

I'm not sure who to put the blame on the Ram v Vista one - MS should either have a prestripped down version or not force it's use (but they kind of have to from their business standpoint) but at the same time, people are still packaging it on computers that can't run it (or installing it there). Eh.

If you wanna see slow, though, try running Vista Home Basic on 512 MB of RAM. It's sooooooo bad.

To be honest, I might consider sticking with M$ for longer if someone could come up with an AIM client for PC's that's even half as good as Adium (I've tried Pidgin, Trillian, everything...running Digsby now and it's buggy as all get-out). PC developers out there, you hear me???

I know that for the ETS (the people who administer the GRE), their free software is only available for Windows XP. Their argument is that their testing centers run on XP so they don't have any other version available.

Personally, I had to set up Parallels on my Mac to be able to utilize all this software.

That's ok, I ditched MS once and for all when they dropped that Vista bomb on the world. Switched to Macs, and never looked back. Running a successful studio here without a single Windows machine in the shop.

@BZMedia: I think the version you speak of goes by a different name...Windows 7. :-D I could sit here all day and gush, but I'll spare you. It's gorgeous and everything Vista was supposed to be. Totally restored my faith in M$.

"So when, exactly, is Kaplan planning on making their program work on what is soon going to be a legacy OS?"

hopefully never. everytime a company supports a failure like vista it makes everything else cost more and take longer to develop.

and anyways, anyone smart enough to go to grad school should know how to read system requirements.

Brilliant. Juuuuuust brilliant.

P.S. Kudos to the OP for calling the phone answerer on his BS!!! :)

That's how she ran into the problem to begin with, it seems.

Wow. What will it finally take for companies to understand that they are in business to serve the customer. Why does the customer have to fit to the companies wishes? Circuit City learned, CompUSA learned, GM learned, someone still in business better wise up.