Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD

Excellent product and service!

I through it out because it is so bad. Where should I start? The dictionary navagation is not user friendly. The media has nothing that is informative and is of poor quality. I have 21" Sonly Trinitron Monitor with a 128MB video card and 2.8 processor. I feel much of information on Africa and Pan Africa is racially slanted.

If you're thinking about upgrading from the 2003 version, don't bother. This one is equally slow (even when all of the files are fully installed on hard disks) and the content appears to be virtually the same. The interface is more attractive, but just as inefficient and difficult to use.The articles are well written, but fragmented and not as complete as one would hope.All in all, a disappointment. Judging from the other reviews on this page, that view is widely shared.

It has some good articles... but at times it is hard to read, like a textbook written in greek, rather than in plain simple english.also, while I was looking as Nash Solution in Game Theory, I found that the tables are missing! How could that be!Then I joined the 90 day online trial, which required a credit card... depending on people to forget about the subscription and earn money from that... what a good and not so moral strategy... interestingly, the online content contains the missing tables... and it costs $25 per year. So it might be better just to subscribe to the online version, and be able to find articles any where you are with an online computer.also the DVD-ROM version doesn't let you copy the whole article to Word or Notepad with ease. You need to do it screenful by screenful. The online version is just a webpage and allows easy copying to Word or Notepad.

I have bought both Encarta and Britannica for years (EB in printed edition too: 32 volumes, 32.000 sheets). This is my opinion in brief: Encarta is excellent in all aspects, but Britannica's authoritative text (sometimes outdated) makes interesting to buy both.¿DVD or CD? Both editions are actually the same. You can copy them in your hard disk.TEXT: Britannica is a superb encyclopedia in text (not in visual aid) since 1768 (you know: an article by Einstein and so on...). Text in electronic version differs from printed encyclopedia (very large articles have been shortened). Britannica claims that it has more items than Encarta, but this is a joke: articles like "Mexico" are only one (with a lot of subdivisions) in Encarta, while in Britannica subdivisions are unconnected, and you must "jump" from one subdivision to another, which is slow and very annoying, especially if you want to copy it in "WORD". Very often, the text is not updated.In the other hand, Encarta's text is not bad at all. Most articles have the name of their contributors (professions, works...): They are not John Doe. You can find large fragments of literary works, literature guides, a lot of sidebars and thousands of quotations. "Encarta Africana" is included. The Pop-Up (double clicking a word) Dictionary and Thesaurus has sound for correct pronunciation (by the way, it can read aloud, with a robotic and ugly voice, a whole article). The "Translation Dictionaries" to Spanish, French, German and Italian must be improved, because they are minimal. It gives you a lot of "Internet links", even if you are not connected. With Britannica you must be "on-line" and it searches in an EB Web page.In theory you can update Britannica over the Internet free for a year quarterly (4 times), but this does not work: You can not find new files. Encarta can be updated free EVERY WEEK with new articles and additions or corrections to the old ones (till October 2004). With Encarta updating really works. Technically, is amazing to see the changes in old items.ATLAS Britannica has not a real atlas; only a worlds map whose maximum detail is the States of USA. Statistics are very poor. Encarta's Atlas is like another encyclopedia, with a great detail (1 cm/ 4 km all over the world) and 20 types of atlas presentations (statistical ones can be counted by dozens). If you look a geographical article (city, river...) you can see in a corner where it is placed and, with only a click, open the atlas. In articles of cities, if you are on-line, you can see in another corner the weather of this place in that moment. If it is a USA place, you can read the latest news.MULTIMEDIA: They say that "serious" or "adult" readers do not care about "pictures"; that multimedia is only for kids. I do not agree, because I think that, sometimes, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Works of art, anatomy, historical maps, diagrams ... Encarta devastates Britannica with a lot of photos, paintings, drawings, charts & tables, animations, interactivities, videos, music and sounds, pictures, 2-D and 3-D virtual tours, 360-degrees views, timeline, games... It is not only the quantity and quality. It is the easy access you have to all the multimedia, and that text and multimedia are fully integrated. Britannica is not really multimedia. It has photos and videos, but they make the program slow and sluggish. They should edit an alternative version with only text, as they did with the first edition in 1995. It worked fast and easy in old computers.INTERFACE AND PERFORMANCE: This is the worst side of Britannica. With Encarta you only have to type a word or the beginning of a word to see all the articles and multimedia that contain it. If Encarta does not find anything, it gives you automatically alternative spellings. Even if you write the name of a small village lost in any country, you see it in the atlas. If you need to copy text or pictures, the integration with Microsoft WORD is perfect. It has additional ways to find content, including subject or multimedia browsing, "related articles" and the standard A-Z method. The "Research Organizer" is very helpful too. Encarta's TEXT FONT is very clear (Britannica's...) and you can choose 3 sizes.Navigating with Britannica is different. 2004 edition is better than 2003 one, but still it is disappointing. I will only give you an example: if you do not know the exact and correct spelling of a name or word, it does not help you with similar spellings (unless you open a window and fight with it). As I said before, the program's performance speed is very slow and sluggish, and it must be dramatically improved. To go "back and forward" you do not find any icon and you need to open a "menu".... One "pro" for Britannica: they say it works with Macintosh.I repeat my modest piece of advice: Encarta is excellent in all aspects, but Britannica's authoritative text (sometimes outdated) make interesting to buy both.

It is all around the best available encyclopedia. There are other, but Encarta represents exact Microsoft's incline to put in more buttons and few knowledge. This is not only the best encyclopedia but it is the best Britannica. The quality of materials you get in enormous. The cross-reference are logical and helpful, the article well written and intriguing. It appears to be Java app, so it runs smoothly on any platform. I have it on my lovely two Apple machines and could not be happier. Britannice made the real leap from 2003 release to this one.

Why can't an application like this let you choose the font used to display articles? I'd like to use Arial 8 but the program limits you to choosing from three sizes of its own built in fuzzy-looking font. Britannica should forget about creating software and just license their content to Microsoft.