I know that some people seem to have had a bad experience with Space Holdings, but I have ordered both directly from them and also from Amazon before and was satisfied with both previous transactions. I will concur that they seem to have some internal communication issues and that the people you may talk to on the phone don't seem to have a very good handle on things... at least when you consider that they actually work for the company. It kind of feels like you've called someone's house and their 4yo kid picked up the phone. Trying to get Mommy or Daddy on the phone at that point can be tricky.
While I can't speak to the quality of other similar products (Red Shift, TheSky, etc.), I can say that I have been VERY happy with Starry Night. Having been a Starry Night Backyard user since version 3.0, I can say that it was worth my upgrade to 4.0 and then again to 4.5 (Enthusiast). I am now using 4.5.2 on my Apple TiBook running Mac OS X 10.3.2. The product is satisfactory to me in every way, and really lacks nothing that I use for amateur observation of the sky. I thoroughly enjoy it personally.
Additionally, I enjoy it professionally. I teach astronomy at a public high school with over 1400 students. I see about 130 of those students each year enrolled in astronomy. We use Starry Night Backyard (version 4.0.5) running on Mac OS X (10.2.8) as a part of the curriculum that I have developed. I have been totally satisfied with it as an educator.
Obviously I'm runnning all this on a Mac and the same was true with my version 3.0 (though that was on Mac OS 9). It could be that this product does not run as well on a Windows machine, but that can be said of a great many things. If you decide to get it, though, I would recommend is getting it from Amazon or some other source than directly from Space Holdings. Not only do they charge full retail price for the product, but because they're in Canada, the shipping is outrageous.
Customer Review: Don't buy from Space Holdings
This product crashed my machine, which is a new Dell Inspiron laptop running Windows XP. There customer service is dismal. After four emails and no response, I returned the product and stopped the payment on my credit card, indicating that it was fraudulently represented as a functional product. They have the worst customer support I've ever experienced. Buy something else. Click Here For More Info
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