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Create a detailed inventory of your household, including multiple photos.
Frostbow Home Inventory 5 Pro is a full featured database program for cataloging, organizing, and tracking your household possessions. It is easy to use graphical user interface with extensive on-line help. Twenty-three separate fields for inputting descriptive data on each item in your home inventory, including: item name, manufacturer, model/style, serial number, engraved or not engraved, insured or not insured, category, location, status, condition, date acquired, purchased from, heir, warranty, cost each, quantity, total cost, current value, total value, two images, description, and comments. Store multiple images for each item.
Reasonably priced, very flexible, easy to use, adjustable font size (!), lots of information on each item, changing fields on one inventory file does not affect any other file, keeps images.
Cons
Personally, I didn't find any.
Summary
I tried several home inventory apps, and finally settled on one that has lots of nice features. It was certainly a satisfactory app, except for one thing: you can absolutely only use it on on machine at a time. For some, that's fine. For me, it was not. There are multiple PCs in the house, and I want to be able to enter items in the house on the handiest PC rather than going up and down the steps. Frostbow is "family friendly" and lets me install the registered Pro version on as many machines as we have (as long as only one is using Frostbow at a time).
Once I got into it, I was really amazed at Frostbow's flexibility. You can make multiple inventory files. So far I have one for household goods and one for my Christmas ornament collection. And — get this! — I can have different settings (font size, field names, drop-down field contents, you name it) for each inventory file. I don't need to know what "room" the ornaments are in, so that field is "packaging" for that file, but it doesn't affect the household file at all.
For me, with trifocals, being able to change the size of the font on every thing is just super.
I haven't played much with the reports, but I see that there are some stock layouts and that you can completely design your own if you want.
Other apps don't have near the flexibility of this one. I've been using it for a year now, and still love it. I'll get the house done soon!
Good solid home inventory program.
AllRoundGuy
Pros
Solid and easy to use for the most part. Tech support is wonderful.
Cons
Picture import is less than intuitive, but fairly easy to figure out.
Summary
I got tired of using the home inventory product from Intuit because they kept changing formats on me, so when it was time to upgrade again, I went looking for another similar product. I first tired Frostbow Home Inventory Lite 5 and was pretty pleased with it so I got the trial version of Pro. It is everything the Intuit product is and more. Intuit treats their version like a poor stepchild. This, on the other hand, is a main line product. I sent a question to tech support and it was promptly and accurately answered. When I bought the product, an update was already available for downloading. I'm impressed with Frostbow Home Inventory Pro 5 and the company.
On the downside, I went to retrieve an image and was confronted by a second window that was full featured, but a little confusing. After only a couple of minutes work, I successfully imported the picuture, but this could use a little more hand-holding for the consumers.
Too many errors
anitraka86
Pros
It's very easy to use
Cons
there's just too many errors when I'm loading a picture. It freezes my computer and I have to shut it down all the way.
Summary
Quick, nice prog., tons of info per item, pictures too!
ohiodozer
Pros
Straight forward, clean and un-cluttered screens, well tabbed with pulldowns.
Cons
A little difficult at first to get photo images dropped in place. Just took a little time playing with it. Could use drag and drop capabilities.
Summary
All in all, a really simple and great program that is quite useful with all the charts and graphs that can be generated at a click. Including thumbnail pics with each item is exactly what I was looking for, along with the "search" feature. It will do an excellent job for anyone at just the right price....nothing!!<br /><br /><span class='notifyMsg'> Updated </span>on May 10, 2009<p/>Sorry, I downloaded version 5.2.3 which is the totally free version and put my review on the 5.2.4 version.
User friendly & provides for all needed information.
conoton
Pros
I like that multiple images - resizable - can be associated with the item.
Cons
Summary
Wow! Does a lot for only $20 bucks!
My3SonsPlus1
Pros
Very easy to get up and going. Has all my required data fields included. I tested this program, A2Z Home Inventory ($20) and Inventory Organizer Deluxe ($65). I wanted a program that would keep pictures in its own database and Frostbow is the only one that does so. With the others, the program only links to a picture on your hard drive. If you erase it, then obviously you have no picture in the database either. This program does a lot for only $20 - I see that if you have a previous version the upgrade only costs $5! These folks are either very fair or they're still living in the nineties!
Cons
Can't really think of any, except that I wish it would sort by just clicking on the column headings like in some other Windows-based apps. Maybe in a future version?
