Dear New York Times 20 years, 2 months ago by Martey Dodoo

I do not expect everyone to have the same technological acumen that I myself possess. But when a reporter is attempting to review various tax software packages, and is unable to competently download, I begin to wonder about the journalistic integrity of your publication:

The ordering and downloading took 45 minutes, possibly because of some ineptness on my part. Faced with an option to open or save the program, I chose open. Later, during the installation process, there was an instruction to close all Windows programs. Assuming that this included Internet Explorer, the software used to order the program, I closed them all, and the program could not be found. But a second trip to the TaxCut Web site allowed the downloading process to be completed.

It is the phrase "possibly because of some ineptness" which gets my goat. Yes, the "Open-Save" dialog is one of the most confusing parts of Internet Explorer. If you click "Open," the program is downloaded to your Internet cache and run from there. If you click "Save," the program is downloaded to the location that you select in the next dialog, but it is not run. Since the majority of computing experience of non-technical users comes from word processing programs, where "opening" loads a document and "saving" is an action you take when you are finished, the use of these words is unfortunate.

But the reader has the right to make the assumption that Delafuente has downloaded programs from the Internet before, especially since it is a large part of his review. He also had trouble downloading TurboTax:

The tested version was TurboTax Basic, which costs $29.95 plus sales tax. The big drawback here was the time spent ordering and downloading the program from www.turbotax .com. Using a high-speed cable modem, it took an hour and a quarter. The program stopped midway through downloading, but when restarted, it offered to resume where it had left off. It would probably be faster to order the program as a CD online, which was an option, or to buy it on CD at a store.

From what I know about shipping times, I doubt that ordering the CD online and waiting for it to come in the mail would take less time than downloading it, even compensating for Internet Explorer crashes.