Like thousands of agents across the country I've waited for a year for Homes.com to fulfill it's promise of delivering a working version of PREP Suite.

The latest representations from Homes.com were that version 4.1 would finally be the answer.

Having received a copy a few weeks ago, I decided I would wait until I had a significant amount of time before installing and reviewing the program.

It's a good thing I did.

THE INSTALLATION

Installing and configuring the software actually went quite well. What made me nervous however, is that it took significantly longer than any other program I've ever loaded.

What could it be doing that takes so much time?

You'll find out soon enough.

RUNNING PREP 4.1

The functioning of this program is truly substandard. Simple tasks take far too many steps to complete. Menus items and action buttons don't frequently execute tasks a normal user would expect. Little about the software is intuitive or easy to learn.

Standard Windows functions such as using the Tab-Key to move from field to filed or pressing the CTRL & F4 key simultaneously to close active windows worked sometimes, but not at others. Almost every action within the software is an exercise in frustration.

While the program's lack of consistency and intuitive functioning might be worth overcoming if the software was reliable, unfortunately, that's not the case at all.

CRASHING DOWN

As its predecessor, (4.0) was known to have substantial problems with hogging system resources and leaking memory, I first removed all programs that run it the background to test how efficiently PREP would run on it's own and without interference from other software.

I began my session with a whopping 98% of my system resources available for PREP to use. (Press the Windows & Pause keys simultaneously and then choose the Performance section to see what your system's resources are)

As was my fear, each task I executed in PREP stripped more and more of the computer's available resources until they fell below 50%. Even closing all open windows within the program would not restore the necessary resources.

At this point, PREP crashed and offered a rather unique dialog box titled "Automation Error" which tendered three options, (OK, HELP, and KNOWLEGEBASE) none of which did any good.

Thus, it took PREP less than 20 minutes to bring my system to a complete halt; with no other programs running and a sample database of just 100 records.

PREP had my system so stuck in the mud that even "Ctrl+Alt+Del" wouldn't restart my computer. Time to pull the plug, both literally and figuratively.

UNINSTALLATION & FURTHER SURPRISES

After yanking the power cord, rebooting and running "scandisk" to correct the file errors caused by Homes.com's latest release, I decided there was no good reason to leave it on my hard drive at all.

An "uninstall" was called for and promptly executed.

While the removal seemed to run smoothly, and quickly, it turns out that the words "uninstall" and "remove all components" seem to mean something very different to the folks at Homes.com than they do for most of us.

While I have no idea how many files the software initially installed, it took over an hour to track down over 1,600 files that were occupying in excess of 50 Megabytes of space on my hard drive.

While I have known various programs to leave bits and pieces of themselves on my system after removal, leftovers of this magnitude are absolutely unheard of.

Never have I experienced anything like this. PREP 4.1 actually left more on my drive than many of my programs ever installed in the first place!

Unfortunately, it gets worse.

It turns out that a substantial amount of the excessive time PREP used to install itself was used to modify the system "registry" files. Entries to the registry are complicated to track down and remove, and are beyond the skills of the vast majority of business computer users.

It took me over six hours of time to remove somewhere between 1000 to 2000 items from my system's registry using a copy of a registry cleaning program; and it's highly unlikely that I found them all!

To say that Homes.com latest release of PREP 4.1 is a dismal failure is an understatement.

Not only is the software completely unreliable after installation, but the mere act of doing so will leave your system changed forever, and not for the better as my experience clearly shows.