Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Invaluable, October 23, 2003
I've tried both Encarta 2004 and Britannica 2004. As other reviews here pointed out, Britannica is also good, but the interface leaves a lot to be desired and program is very very sluggish. I'm on a 1.6Mhz Pentium 4 Windows XP system, with 1 gigabyte of memory. So I was a bit surprised how slow it was.I decided to go with Encarta because it's faster, has more multimedia, and I like how Microsoft updates it (and displays a list of what was updated/added). I haven't tried the older versions of Encarta so I cannot compare, but 2004 looks and works fine for me. Some have complained about the Visual Browser "carousel" on the main page of the program. This can easily be disabled in the program options if it annoys you. The Encarta interface is very clean and organized. Colorful detailed buttons on the toolbar make it very easy to access the most common tasks and the search function is very fast. It seems the more you dig into it, the more goodies you'll find. There are great interactivities, games, dynamic atlas, 3D and 2D virtual tours, thousands of quotations, an entire dictionary program, and lots more. If you're used to the Internet Explorer browser, the "Favorites" menu in Encarta is identical and a great way to bookmark and organize your favorite places in this vast program. It's very easy to get "lost" for hours just clicking around. I haven't looked through an encyclopedia on CD-ROM since the early 90's when CD-ROM technology was just starting to take off. I'm pleased to see how detailed and invaluable they've become. I'd recommend this to anyone.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I would buy it again., July 29, 2003
Where to start.. That's a tough question to ask me as i try to figure what feature i should praise first..
The Dictionary/Thesaurus/Foreign Language Translator-(will help me greatly hehe)
*The most comprehensive and extensive dictionary i've ever seen. (that's saying a lot)
*EVERY word has an audible pronunciation that you can hear.
*Translate any word in the dictionary to Spanish, French, German, and Italian (and vice verse) (no audio on foreign languages)
*Start typing what you believe the spelling of the word to be, and see a list of possibilities you might be thinking of.
The Atlas
*Find major highways in any part of the world.
*Find any city in the world, click on it, get it's content page which includes all references to said city
*Pull up the Dynamic Sensor and watch the lat/long time zone, and time of day go by
*Choose between the standard globe, the tectonic plate globe, the Religious Influence globe, the political influence globe, "Earth by Day" and "Earth at Night" globes are really cool. There's a globe of the moon which is equally as stunning. Those are just a few of the globe options.
Who says you want to look at a recent map? Check out the Historical Map section. Theres one of the Ancient Isrealites during the time of King David.
THE Graphical User Interface
*A three year old could manage easily
*An Adult would truly appreciate the simplicity of the GUI, not to mention how well it is all tied together.
*I sincerely appreciate the option of a full download. NO CD SWAPPING!
*Scroll mouse compatible
Photos and Maps and Sounds
*Wow. I can't say it any other way. I didn't know the beating of Rodney King lasted that long...
*They got Colin Powell on video giving a series of dissertations in regards to several aspects of the integration of the white and black person in earlier America. ("earlier" was not as long ago as we may like)
*They got Kofi Annan (prime minister of the U.N.) to give a short talk on the situation of Africa.
*Countless still photos depicting history
*About 20 fully panoramic scenes (amazing)
THE TIMELINE
My personal favorite. The layout is simple and intuitive, the amount of at a glance world history really a sight to see.
Those are among my favorites, but i must not leave out the myriad of other features like the free updates, world statistics, the games, the ancient landmark tours you can take in full 3-d, the homework and research guides, literature guides (articles on pieces of literature), famous quotes that rivals the amount of words from their dictionary..
And i haven't even gotten to the encyclopedia part of it..
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I love this product!, July 21, 2003
I've not seen Encarta before so I have no idea about previous versions. However, this version is very impressive. I'm a computer professional and I can say that very few products have a user interface that 'flows' this well. My primary reason to get this was for my 10-year-old, but I think I'll be using it a lot more than her. The maps, dictionaries, articles, and links to related content on the web are great, but how they are all tied together is what really makes this product shine.It does take a while to load and you want to install everything on your hard drive (about 2Gig). If you don't load everything to your disk then you'll wear out your arm swapping between the 5 CDs when you look at different articles.
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