Punch! Professional Home Design Platinum V12

• All of the features of both industry-acclaimed Punch! Master Landscape & Home Design and Punch! Professional Home Design Suite software, and more
• LiveView window continually updates your home designs, in real-time 3D, as you draw
• PhotoView technology lets you import real-world photos into your home and landscape designs to create a truly realistic image of your home
• Powerful 3D graphics engine that lets you create real-time walk or fly-throughs--for a Hollywood-style voyage through your new creation
• This garden and landscape design software allows you to create multi-level or multi-story decks with 3D photo-realistic textures, stairs, railings, object placement, and color capabilities

Sucks!:
This program just sucks! It's exceedingly slow (and I have a fast system), it has numerous bugs and it's a pain to use once you get past the basics. I could never get the material/color selection to work with my Nvidia graphics card and after swapping to an ATI card which it was supposed to work with it still didn't work properly. After suffering with Punch! for a week I wanted to punch the developers! I then went out and bought Home Designer Pro 7.0 which cost over 4X the price. Guess what? It was worth every penny. It is far more accurate (for instance incorporates sheetrock and siding into walls and lets you change these as desired), has more features, is easier to use and doesn't have laundry list of bugs. Trust me; don't buy this software if you intend to use it to design a house that will actually be built. Spend the extra money it will save you a lot of heartache.

Looking elsewhere:
I give up. I don't know if it is me, or the program, but I have had it. Clunky user interface, features that simply don't work (try adjusting the viewer elevation with mouse clicks--as described--doesn't work). I cannot figure out how to group objects. You can group them, and cut and paste, but a reasonable approach would be to group and move. Help says you can, but I cannot make it work. Etc. Last straw--I finally got a decent layout. Saved it; exited the progam. Program asks you if you want to save, even if you just did. I didn't (mistake?). Reopen--half my work is gone. If you are like I was--ignorant of this class of program and don't know which to buy--try one of the others. I don't know if the alternatives are better, but this program is a mess.

Decent program:
This is a good program for the money -- not a professional program - but also not for beginners. It does give you a good sense of what the finished house will look like.

Home Design Platinum V12.0:
Although there is a learning curve in using this software, it comes with all the "bells & whistles" Should one need further info, there are numerous forums, and manufacturers support. I am on the way to designing my home Frank

Couldn't even get it installed on Vista:
I've had nothing but problems with Punch Software from the beginning, even purchasing it was a problem. I won't go into the many examples and gory details, but it's enough to know that I couldn't even get the software installed on my Vista machine: the Support site lets you know that you have to turn off the user authentication control and start in Safe Mode to install it, and even that didn't work for me. From my own experience I would recommend staying away from this software.