chess software

I am just a novice and I need some opinions.  I have used Chessmaster and it seemed to rate me at least 300 points above my actual human on human play.  Is there a program whose rating is closer to human reality (at least my reality)? 

Thanks,

Jerry 

jerrycunningham> "it seemed to rate me"

Chessmaster's (9000+) ratings were calibrated based on games against USCF opponents... so it should be accurate as long as you play in Tournament mode (no takebacks, strict clock, play as both colours) and choose a variety of opponents... more accurate than most software. So double-check that you set those options and used time controls similar to what you use in human-human games. Of course, it can't re-create the psychology of a real tournament game so there's bound to be differences.

This is the one I use.  Der Bringer. Very simple layout.  It has an advantage graph you can display along with the usual clock and algebreic notation.  Plus it's free

 "Der Bringer can beat most intermediate-level players. On a 133-MHz Pentium, with 40-MB hash tables, Der Bringer 1.6 achieved a rating of 2150 in the LCT2 positions test. Der Bringer can be used with the Nalimov Endgame Tablebases. "

http://chess.kearman.com/html/software.htm

It's the top one on the list. I don't remember whether or not this was the site I downloaded from.  It has been a while.