Why I buy this one ?
- Encyclopedia software
- Find information on nearly any subject, both online and off
- Encarta content is provided alongside online search results
- System requirements: Windows 98/Me/2000 Professional/XP
- Recommended: 500 MHz processor

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What our customer's say!

"Good product.", The new Interface is cool. the content is also top nortch. It is only a shame that they don't have accuracy on other countries as the USA on the Maps and historical events of other countries in the world.

"Microsoft Encarta", I've been hooked on Encarta since 1998 when it came preloaded on my first computer. I've had it ever since. It has everything for any age group from child to adult. I find the 3D views of famous places especially fascinating. It's like taking a trip without leaving your house.

"Compared to the Free Wikipedia CD version 0?", Lots of information but I wonder how this compares to the free wikipedia schools CD, the first version of which you can download or get on CD for free? I think these paid CDs are no longer worth the money and the WP one keeps getting improved and re-released. You can find the WP CD by googling for "2006 Wikipedia CD" or at FAQs at Wikipedia. Browse online and compare for yourself

"Excellent", We got this and are using it for school. We are galloping the globe and this is alot of help. I really like it.



"Great resource", My daughter has done really well with this. She enjoys the kids section the most.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Microsoft Encarta 2006 Premium", I receive Microsoft Encarta 2006 Premium in good condition

"Bitterly disappointed", Microsoft have had years to get the Encarta interface right, and they still can't manage it. By now we can be sure of their strategy: deliberately build in imperfections and slyly *remove* existing functionality in order to give them something to improve in future editions, without which improvements they will have no product to market every year.

Every year I look for basic improvements which are never there.

- The homepage now has a huge picture of a white sea anemone type creature. A high quality image, but I don't want to see it every darn time! Surely Microsoft would realise that you can't please everyone all the time when it comes to images (desktop wallpapers, screensavers, etc) so why would they palm this thing off on us...?? We cannot get rid of it. Imagine if the background image could change randomly every time using pictures from the encyclopedia. That would have been interesting. Microsoft are just not thinking.

- On the homepage there is a large green information balloon pointing to the search bar. Isn't everyone sick of this sort of patronisation? The first time you see it the balloon performs its function, thereafter it is just annoying. My instinct is to immediately get rid of it (shouting "Alright, I'm not an idiot!") but I can't!

- The only other feature on the homepage is a dull list of subject items on the left, which takes us into a boring spiral of menu choices resulting in a highly selective set of (often disappointing) results. I tried this once and will never use it again. You won't either.

- There is still an almost complete lack of options available for customising Encarta. Certainly no improvement here at all over previous years. What on earth have all those programmers in that huge building in Seattle been doing all this time?

- There has been no updating of the Atlas maps, no new roads or improved accuracy. That would have been a reasonable step forward, but Microsoft seems to have left the Atlas for dead for many years. For example, go to Thailand and browse around for Kanchanaburi, a sizeable town and a prime tourist destination (site of the River Kwai bridge). The town does not even appear on the map. Surely it would be easy enough to run the maps by someone in each country and get them to point out some salient improvements like this?

- There is still no direct link from the homepage to the Atlas! How difficult is it to add an icon for that?? We have to go through the menus to reach it, like it is some trivial addition to the program.

- Where is full screen mode? There is no full screen mode!! The Atlas maps are squashed into a corner of the screen. We need full screen mode for the maps! Doh!!

- There is a large amount of wasted screen space that could have put to better use. A very broad white bar at the top is almost empty. In the Atlas there is a big new sidebar containing pointlessly huge icons that takes up a fair percentage of screen space. These icons are hardly ever used - this is a major design step backwards from the previous edition. They could have used this space to provide bigger "cinemascope" maps - that would have been great. One wonders at the amazing lack of gumption of the people responsible for designing these layouts. But again, we can probably assume they are deliberately putting aside such improvements for future editions.

- I find I am no longer able to associate .erl files (in Explorer) to open in Encarta. No doubt some inscrutable new security system prevents me from doing this, which to me was essential for opening my favourites files (maps) within the Atlas. I'm quite peeved about this.

- The Atlas now defaults to the "hand" curser every time you open it, even though I never use the hand curser, prefering the "select area" cursor. Again, no customisation is allowed. I have to manually click the "select area" curser every time I open the Atlas. Another step backwards and very annoying!

- I'm glad they got rid of the long list of subject headings that appeared on the left side of the homepage (I was tired of seeing "Bertie Ahern" at the top), but it was a mistake to get rid of it completely. There were occasions when it was actually useful to browse down the list - it gave you a feel of exactly how deep the coverage was and was the best method of serendipitous browsing. This list is now nowhere to be found!

In short, the new search interface is the only improvement in the 2006 edition. Given the regression in other areas you will be better off sticking with the 2005 edition. All in all the 2006 edition is hugely disappointing and has really damaged my confidence in Microsoft's ability to give us what we want. This business of routinely releasing new versions every year is holding us back, not taking us forward! You can imagine how terrifed they are that the day will come when they cannot improve the product significantly anymore. You can be sure they will never make it perfect for us for this reason.









"Most extensive title. Well done, some thin spots.", Encarta 2006 is, overall, an excellent product. No installation problems and no problems running it on a 1.1 Ghz laptop with Windows XP. I did discover, however, that it likes RAM and ran more quickly when I increased my RAM from 384 to 768 MB. The content is quite good, with the occasional thin spot. Obvious topics are extremely well covered while some more obscure queries lack in detail. For example, my 7-year-old son and I were interested in the human digestive system and found a great diagram and articles. When we looked up wild turkeys however, we discovered the article did not contain a description of their diet (though it did have a nice recording of a wild turkey call). Multimedia items such as sounds and videos are plentiful and appear regularly in articles. Within a few days I realized what a bargain this package is given the sheer volume of content. No encyclopedia will be everything to everyone, but Encarta 2006 Deluxe is a fine reference product.

"Redefines the digital encyclopedia", I would have wanted a little more content, but for that I guess there's the Wikipedia and the general internet. What this digital encyclopedia does is not just give you information but the feeling of being there. You pick up on the nuances of a subject, not just the raw data. I grew up with a number of encyclopedias as a kid, and Britannica was the king of the tomes. However in the digital world, Britannica 2006 may give me more information and great articles, but Encarta gives me the connected experience, superior multimedia, extra rich and crisp graphics. I also had the 2004 version but there are many new features that make this is a good upgrade.

"Microsoft Embraces the Web", Microsoft was long derided by its critics for having failed to fully grasp the Internet revolution. It was late in developing Net technologies such as a proprietary search engine and in coping with security threats propagated through the Web.

Not any more. Earlier this year MSN rolled out a great search engine and now Microsoft has fundamentally revamped its reference products. By committing itself to this overhaul, Microsoft embraced reality: nine out of ten children (between the ages of 5 and 17) use computers (USA figures) - and 85% of these get their information online.

The Microsoft Encarta Premium 2006 is a breathtaking resource. It caters effectively (and, at $50, affordably) to the educational needs of everyone in the family, from children as young as 7 or 8 years old to adults who seek concise answers to their queries. It is fun-filled, interactive, and colorful.

The 2006 Encarta's User Interface is far less cluttered than in previous editions. Content is arranged by topics and then by relevancy and medium. Add to this the Encarta's Visual Browser and you get only relevant data in response to your queries. The Encarta Search Bar, which was integrated into the product two years ago, and is resident in the Task Pane even when Encarta is closed, enables users to search any part of the Encarta application (encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, etc).

The Encarta's new Web Companion is a (giant) step in the right direction. It obtains search results from all the major search engines without launching any additional applications (like a browser). Content from both the Encarta and the Web is presented side by side. This augmentation explicitly adopts the Internet and incorporates it as an important source of reference.

It may raise important and interesting issues of intellectual property, though. Web content copyright-holders may demand royalties from Microsoft for the use it makes of their wares in its commercial products.

Encarta would do well to also integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. Users should be able to seamlessly access content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface.

The Encarta Premium includes a dictionary, thesaurus, chart maker, searchable index of quotations, games, 32 Discovery Channel videos, 25,000 photos and illustrations, 2800 sound and audio clips, hundreds of maps and tables, and 400 videos and animations. It incorporates numerous third-party texts and visuals (including hundreds of newspaper articles and a plethora of Scientific American features).

The Encarta is augmented by weekly or bi-weekly updates and the feature-rich online MSN Encarta Premium with its Homework Help offerings. Unfortunately, the Encarta still conditions some of its functions - notably its research tools and updates - on registration with its Plus Club.

The Encarta is the most comprehensive, PC-orientated reference experience there is. No wonder it has an all-pervasive hold on and ubiquitous penetration of the child-to-young adult markets. Particularly enchanting is the Encarta Kids interface - an area replete with interactive quizzes, pictures, large icons, hundreds of articles, and links to the full version of the Encarta. A veritable and colorful sandbox. Those kids are going to get addicted to the Encarta, that's for sure!

Encarta actively encourages fun-filled browsing. It is a riot of colors, sidebars, videos, audio clips, photos, embedded links, literature, Web resources, and quizzes. It is a product of the age of mass communication, a desktop extension of television and the Internet.

Inevitably, in such a mammoth undertaking, not everything is peachy. A few gripes:

Regrettably, installation is not as easy as before. The Encarta 2006 makes use of Microsoft's .Net technology. As most home computers lack it, the installer insists on adding it to the anyhow bloated Windows Operating System. There is worse to come: the .Net version installed by Encarta 2006 is plagued with security holes and vulnerabilities. Users have to download service packs and patches from Windows Update if they do not wish to run the risk of having their computers compromised by hackers.

Fully installed, the Encarta Premium 2006 gobbles up more than 3.5 Gb. That's a lot - even in an age of ever cheaper storage. Most homesteads still sport PCs with 20-40 Gb hard disks. This makes the Encarta less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. Despite the hype, relatively few users possess DVD drives (but those who do, find the entire encyclopedia available on one DVD).

The Encarta DVD 3-D tours have improved but they still hog computer resources and are essentially non-interactive. Is it worth the investment and the risk to the stability and performance of the user's computer?

The Encarta tries to cater to the needs of challenged users, such as the visually-impaired - but is still far from doing a good job of it.

The atlas, dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in the Encarta are outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? The Encarta's New English Dictionary dropped a glossary of computer terms it used to include back in 2001. All's the pity.

But that's it. Encarta is a must-buy (especially if you have children). The Encarta is the best value for money around and significantly enhances you access to knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries all over the world. The amount and quality of content squeezed into a $50 package (before rebate) defies belief. I am a 44 years old adult but when I received my Encarta Premium 2006, I was once more a child in a land of wonders. How much is such an experience worth to you? Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"