I regret buying Hollywood Strings and wish I had my $1,000 back.  Vienna is easy to understand and takes little system resource.  Hollywood is a confusing mish-mash of different, overlapping patches all of which respond differently to velocity, speed, and conrtollers.  It takes forever to load patches and then they don't sound half the time because of system resources, even though I have a pretty powerful system.
 
After six months of having Hollywood installed, I have no idea what to do to get a simple legato violin line.
 
I am sorry now I didn't add on Appassionata instead of buying Hollywood.

$1000?! Ouch.

I said $1,000, but will have to check my receipts.  I see that Sweetwater now has this listed for $795, but I thought I paid a little more.  Anyway, $795 + the additional drive + the time is a little too much for something that adds little value.

The product sounds good when you can finally get it to work, but it just isn't worth.  Vienna is a 100 times easier.

I'm glad you found something that works for you...Sorry about the expensive learning lesson. I personally have really enjoyed Cinematic Strings2 and could recommend them to anybody interested in some great sounding strings at a GREAT price... http://www.cinematicstrings.com/

I had Vienna first and was trying to expand my sound selection with Hollywood.  Don't get me wrong: it sounds great, but it is a real pain.  Using the keyswith samples in Hollywood covers a lot of ground and those patches are not too bad to use, but getting true legato takes a lot of work and computer horsepower.

I have heard good things about Cinematic strings and their demo is impressive.

I have solo, chamber, and orchestral strings for Vienna (plus the wind and percussion intruments) so I am in good shape, but it is nice to have a variety of string samples.

You might want to check out:

Spitfire Albion: http://www.spitfireaudio.com/albion.html
LA Scoring Strings (LASS): http://audiobro.com/

+1 for Cinematic Strings 2.0 and Albion.    Both are great, but you need a powerful computer for either. 

Hey Konrad

What are your system specs? Can you explain a bit how you use Hollywood Strings... a typical scenario...?

I'm sure you checked your system specs before committing yourself to buying HS (and even then their claims for sys requirements are a bit overblown imo). So it seems a bit odd that you're having such problems using them...

I have been throwing my money towards 8DIO Productions of late,
easy to use, easy on the computer and sound great.
They have plenty of libs to choose from.

http://8dio.com/?btp_product=adagio-violins-vol-1

They have a few nice freebie/Tasters as well. 
I believe they have more libraries on the way.  
http://8dio.com/ 

Garry

+1 on 8DIO, haven't tried the strings/violins since I have EWQLSO but I have a lot of their stuff, the epic taiko and frame drums are fantastic, also the Bazantar and Legacy grand are just amazing when you need something moody and brooding.

Wish they'd do a Duduk next.

  EDIT: Also for those libraries that just takes up horsepower I use MIDI over LAN and have a closet with some older q6600 just running a vst host loaded with whatever I don't want on my main box, very little additional latency if you already have a network in place. I remote to them using TightVNC when I need to change something. It's great because you can useually snag up used Q6600s for peanuts now.