Encarta 2007 Views

General Goods

Installing Encarta Premium 2007 via DVD took about 15 minutes in our tests. This program also includes five CDs, in case you lack a DVD drive. You'll need a Windows XP SP2 computer with at least 1.2GB of hard drive space free; and 512MB of RAM is recommended. Microsoft was polite to not force us into installing a desktop shortcut. When the setup process asked whether we wanted our usage of Encarta to be monitored, we declined.

If you're buying Encarta to help a child with classwork, you might consider paying a bit more for the $69.95 Student 2007. Student includes Encarta and on top of that, adds homework help, such as term-paper tutorials, foreign-language verb conjugations, a graphing calculator, and step-by-step assistance with equations, complete with answer keys.

Microsoft Encarta Kids 2007's big, bright images invite you to wander. The science section's Environment page, for instance, shows 28 pictures from Acid Rain to the Water Cycle. The rival Britannica 2007, by contrast, may be too text heavy to tempt visual learners with short attention spans. However, Encarta Kids could be even more intuitive, When you zero in on a topic, such as the Ecosystem menu's Sahara Desert, the picture of a dune links nowhere. The Read Article button in the corner just sent us back to a write-up about ecosystems in general. Encarta for Kids' articles are more descriptive than those of Britannica Elementary--more like features writing than hard news style. For example, the storytelling approach for an entry on fossils begins: Wading in chilly water under a seaside cliff, you spot an odd piece of rock.

For scholarly research, we still prefer the depth of Encyclopedia Britannica 2007, which consolidates all the information from its bound volumes. Encarta offers a wealth of resources as well, and it better incorporates recent events than its competitor does. Still, we prefer Microsoft Encarta 2007 or Student 2007 as an entertaining and informative learning tool for adults and especially young grade school children, but we would graduate to Britannica for upper-level academic research.