Fritz 15 and Chessbase

I am interested in purchasing software that will improve my game as well as provide entertainment. Can anyone provide information about Fritz 15 and Chessbase and how they can be used together? I am at best an intermediate player (recently began playing again after a 25 year layoff) and am currently using Lucas Chess and Arena 3.5 both of which were free downloads. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much for taking the time to reply. Since I posted I downloaded the trial version of Shredder which may be enough for my needs right now. Do you have any experience with Shredder?

Fritz 15 is more than enough for your needs. Chessbase is for the serious tournament players.

I have Shredder 12. It's a nice GUI for playing Shredder at various levels. However, it does have some limitations.

The database functions are extremely basic; mainly, you work with one game at a time. I don't think you can even copy multiple games at one time.

You can only directly import UCI engines; To import a Winboard engine, you'd have to use a Winboard-to-UCI adapter as an interface. (Although, I think the Fritz GUI also has this problem.)

And I seem to remember that if you're playing tournaments in Shredder, the Shredder engine only plays at full strength, not at reduced levels.

Finally, the graphics - I really only like the standard 2-D piece set. Most of the other 2-D pieces and the 3-D pieces don't appeal to me.

But if I only want to play the Shredder engine, it's really a lot of fun.

Thanks EscherehcsE.

Can you explain a little about how a chess program is utilized to teach openings and endgames. Sorry for the naive question but I know absolutely nothing about chess software or much about the technical aspects of computers for that matter. The last time I played chess there wasn't any software. The internet (or at least the WEB) didn't even exist. There were a couple of machines that used real pieces on boards and touch moves. This was back in 1990. 

Ah, I guess I'm not the best person to try to answer that question. I really haven't spent much time on learning openings, and what little time I've spent on openings has been mostly with books. Same with endgames - mostly books (Lucena position, Philidor draw, etc.).

I mainly use chess programs to blunder check my games (after having tried to analyze the game myself) and to play against engines for fun.

Maybe someone else can weigh in on the question?

I don't use Shredder, but I exclusively use Fritz 12 for analysis of my games as well as databasing of my games. 

I use it for the GUI and the keyboard shortcuts, which I find are way better than SCID/Arena/etc. 

I used to have CHessbase (WinHome edition - got tanked once windows got upgraded) and Fritz did all I needed, so there was no need to go big guns with full CB.

I analyze a lot with Stockfish (in the Fritz interface) but rarely play the engine.

You can download a free Chessbase Reader 2017, Then find and download a free PGN files, theres a lot out there, download also a free database program SCID, it has a good program for a PGN files, it has already but you can use it for all PGN files, and also you can use the PGN in the chessbase reader, theres so many options, just find a good engine program and a database 2018 and you are completed what you need.