Review on Neat Company NeatDesk Desktop 2005410 by Pete Door

I purchased NeatDesk for PC in February 2012 after buying into the hype surrounding the ads. This is the only purchase that made me want to never buy anything again without reading the reviews first. As you can see from others, I'm not alone in the endless problems with this thing, and I suspect most if not all of the rave reviews are fakes manufactured by the company itself. When the combination of scanner and software "worked" as advertised, my experience was: The software CD that came with it installed easily on my PC, although it required Java (slow), and stored all scans and data in a single database , which was only available through NeatDesk software. Essentially, NeatDesk is holding your data hostage and forcing you to use NeatDesk to access it. I soon found that the software itself was very slow (much slower than any other program on my PC, including the scanning and imaging software for my flatbed scanner). Bought 7 years ago. BTW, Canon makes great flatbed scanners!). While the NeatDesk scanner itself can scan dozens of documents per minute, it takes NeatDesk software at least 30 seconds per document to attempt the OCR magic. After this time, you need to double-check the extracted data document and, in most cases, make corrections to make it easier to scan your documents as images and organize them by filename. After scanning about 50 documents into the database, opening the software takes at least 60 seconds. Then, to switch from viewing one document to another, watch for at least 15 seconds per switch. That's the performance I would expect if we were living in the early 90's. The program also crashed every time I tried to close it. The zombie process bundled with a broken Windows Explorer window made the computer run horribly. I had to finish the quest on this one every time. This is how chronic problems arise that go beyond horrible performance. None of the patches fixed the crashing issue. Then I decided to start over on another computer and import the database. Whenever I tried that, I got nonsensical error messages. Through (a lot of) trial and error I found that the databases exported from NeatDesk are only compatible with the same version of the software that was used to initially create the databases. So instead of installing the current download version, you need to install from the old hard drive and import your database. Then you can repair the software. However, I found that after I repaired the software, when I tried to open it, I got error messages stating that my Windows user didn't have permission to do this or that. I'm expecting permission issues on a multi-profile desktop; There was only one profile on this PC that was Administrator. This error made no sense. I couldn't use the software in any way unless I uninstalled it and started again with the original CD. I emailed NeatDesk support and received a reply a few days later. I have worked in support and I understand the value of effective communication. I have provided all useful information that I could find. After several emails, each taking a few days to respond, the rep said he needed to call me to troubleshoot and asked to make an appointment. I replied with the best time to call me every day. I didn't get a reply within 48 hours as promised in the email, so I kept emailing, I didn't get a reply. Two weeks later, after I had already lost confidence in the product and the company and decided to get rid of them, I received another email asking for feedback on their support. I figured why bother. This company obviously doesn't care. They will never succeed as their goal is to make an initial profit, not stay in business for long. It was too late to return it so I sold it on ebay. I probably shouldn't have passed this nightmare on to anyone else, but I wanted a refund of some of the $359 I paid for this useless item. I guess I should have read the warning labels before buying; refurbished ones often seem to be on sale. NeatDesk needs to make a lot of money.