Customer Reviews

Encyclopedia Britannica 2002 Expanded Edition (DVD-ROM)

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

I struggled with the decision of whether to buy Microsoft Encarta's Reference Library DVD 2002 or Encyclopedia Britannica's 2002 DVD. Unfortunately, I chose the latter.

Britannica claims to give you three installation options: "Compact," "Typical," and "Convenience." Convenience installation supposedly installs 2 Gigs of data on your hard drive, allowing you to run the encyclopedia from the hard drive without resorting to pulling info from the DVD. The problem? There is NO convenience installation. I tried installing the program many times using this option, and it never worked. I finally called Britannica's technical support, and they told me that there was no convenience installation. They just opted NOT to use it for the 2002 DVD version. ("Too many problems with installing such a large amount of data," I was told.) So why didn't they at least tell us this in either the installation process or the documentation included with the software??

Also, Britannica's technical support revealed to me that there were still bugs in this program. "Some of the files were misnamed," I was told. "With any new program, we have to rely on our customers to help us with feedback," the technician said. He assured me that software patches would be made available for download in a month or so, but why should I pay ... for a program and then WAIT for its makers to offer me a cleaner, bug-free version?

Another word of caution: searching for information with this program is difficult. Sure, there are thousands upon thousands of articles, but what good is that if the program makes it difficult for you to find them? Britannica claims to offer you 7+ hours of video and audio, but only 61 sound files are ever available to listen to! And they are all samples of musical instruments! Where are the speeches or the national anthems?? When I asked Britannica's technician about this, he only told me that "it depended on how I searched for files." That's not true. These files are just not installing. Visit the article on the United States, for example, and you'll find no sound clip of our national anthem. And yet, if you run Explorer and look into the MP3 folder on the DVD itself, you'll find the U.S. national anthem, along with various other countries' national anthems, none of which you'll find when running the Britannica Encyclopedia. Perhaps these are some of those "misnamed" files I was told about.

At least Britannica offers the buyer a 30-day money back guarantee. Believe me, I'll be taking advantage of this guarantee within the next few days. And I'll use my money to purchase Microsoft's Encarta.

Although Encyclopaedia Britannica ads says "Get the Entire Encyclopaedia Britannica right on your PC" and "it contains the complete text" etc.., this is not true. It was with great frustration that I realized that these were fallacious words. For instance, if you type "Emiliano Zapata" on Britannica's Website, you will read a brief description of Zapata's life along with his PHOTO and the "Encyclopędia Britannica Article" advice. But if you type "Emiliano Zapata" onto the DVD version you will only see the text with no photos. But didn't the advertise said that with the DVD you "GET the ENTIRE Encyclopedia ?" (sic). Am I stupid ? This article showed me that the DVD is not as complete as I was made to think. Probably other articles are missing... As a result, I lost confidence on this encyclopedia and I am considering only use it as a last resource on my studies (I currently own the Encarta Cd-Rom, Grolier Encyclopedia Cd-Rom, Compton's DVD rom and Hutchinson CD-Rom) and I might say that the Encarta interface (at least the 96 edition) is, by far, much more user friendly than Britannica's or everyone's else. The britannica's interface is confusing, separating the text from the multimidia files and showing the same article as more than one result on the same search. I was disapointed in buying this DVD.

I run this program on a reasonably powerful computer (1.2 Athlon) with no problems but a slight delay booting up (perhaps this might translate into a freeze on a less powerful computer). Encarta might be more kid friendly, but don't forget the depth and quality of Britannica's content (after all it has been the premier reference for eons and it's all there on the DVD). I know style counts for something when it comes to the software interface, but don't forget the content, particularly if you're over 13!

This is simply the best reference product I have ever purchased for my family. I have read all the reviews in this forum, and want to point out a few things:

1. Although there is no practical way to do a complete installation with the 2002 DVD, their customer service department is more than happy to exchange your version for a CD Deluxe edition, which does support this installation (nearly 2GB)

2. One reviewer said that there was no alphabetical browse feature, but there IS one in the product. Additionally, there is a subject browse tool called the Knowledge Navigator, which is based loosely on the content from the Propaedia volume of the printed edition.

3. While the multimedia does tend to be scant, it is all EB's original content. Other companies tend to license videos and photos like crazy, but have very little REAL content as far as the text goes. Britannica is known for its original content, and the transfer to CD/DVD is wonderful.

One of the joys I got out of using the 1970s hardcopies as a youngster was to stumbling across tonnes of other topics of interest as I narrowed in on what I was after. Now with the search engine, there is no alphabetical index that alows me to do this. I search for a topic, it gives me that only. If I only know the first few letters of a word I'm looking for, the search engine won't help me. Please put in that index and it will raise the product's edutainment value by 100%

This piece of software is very buggy and holds less information than advertised. The scroll boxes didn't refresh correctly so that I was unable to read the information in the box without closing and reopening the box.
When searching for information on Red Foxes I was unable to find more than a generic article on foxes in general. If you can't find specific information on the most prevalent subspecies then what good is it?

I have owned a hard copy edition of Britannica for over 25 years and it's a masterpiece. I have owned software versions for 6 years, and this year's is without a doubt the worst product of all, and clearly inferior to the contemporaneous Encarta 2002, Worldbook 2002, and even Grolier's 2002. Advertising of content has been confusing and deceitful. Navigation is very poor.

I purchased this product last yr. from Best Buy. I tossed the case which had the serial number on it and put the c.d.'s in my carrying case. Now that I have a new computer, I cannot download the disc's to my new laptop or computer. I payed too much money to not be able to utilize the product.