Thanks everyone. You have all been very helpful, as usual. It will be awhile before I even start on my son's quilt. I have 3 quilts in progress now, among other unfinished crafts. I will post them when they are finished. I work full time and just don't get to sew/quilt as much as I'd like to. But I do love my job too, so that helps.

As for cost. It's $149 new at Amazon and jhittle has it on sale every so often for less. Watch the sewing group sales such as SewitsForSale and Quilters Flea Market. There are some great buys on those. Many people buy and then decide they don't use it or need fast cash.

Thanks. That is good to know.

I bought Quilt Design Wizard, which is by EQ. It was only $30 and at the time I couldn't afford the EQ6. I had also read several posts on this and other forums where people had EQ6 but 'needed to spend more time learning it.' QDW is very basic, but very easy to learn. I use it more for a block swap I'm in - very easy to audition colors/fabrics for single blocks.

Does it have a lot of colors/fabrics to choose from?

I also have quilt wizard and like it alot. You cannot design your own blocks but you can audition different quilt designs. It also has an online quilt of the month download. It has plenty of fabrics but it soon becomes out of date. You can rotate blocks, combine different blocks to see how they work togather. It says it has 200 blocks but I dont think it has near that many.
It has instructions for piecing and paper piecing but they are not the latest methods so you cut out each piece instead of shortcuts to do many at the same time.
It is worth the 30 dollar cost and is easy to use especially if you are not computer savey.

Here's the link to Quilt Design Wizard. You can view a demo.

http://www.quiltdesignwizard.com/qdw/about.asp

I'm sure it's limited on the fabrics, but there are enough colors and patterns to use to give you a general idea of what a block / quilt will look like.

Thanks all.

The only negative I've heard is that you can only install it 4 times. You would need to re-install it if you have a computer crash or if you buy a new computer. That's about it. Does anyone know if you can back it up on a Portable Hard Drive? That would eliminate having to re-install if your computer crashes.

what would make any of of these design tools obsolete? why do they keep coming out with new ones? once you learn to use, say, EQ5, why would you upgrade to EQ6?