Britannica DVD 2000

Ask Britannica :
In similar fashion to theAsk Jeeves website,you can type in a simple question, thanks to the “Natural-language search”ability, or just type in the word of choice.

There’s everything from Baseball to Chernobyl included, the latterI took an interest in having spent a week in Russia as part of a school tripin April 1986, leaving just under two weeks before the tragic incident inquestion. Something else that gets a mention here which I took an interest in,but around ten years later, was theSpice Girls.The only tragic incident to detail there is the release of their records.

Compass :

Take a different view of the world by selecting your place of choice from aworld map and work your way down the countries and continents, or take it fromthe “Place Finder”, an alphabetical drop-down list. Articles provide informationon the continent or region and the ‘at-a-glance’ section gives you a view ofthe nation’s flag and a summary of national facts.

Analyst :

Get into the nitty-gritty with the set of statistics to end all statisticsonce and for ever. Compare data between countries and nations, then creategraphs to go with it which can be exported for use in other packages.

When I went interrailing in 1992, I could see from my travels in Prague thatthe we have twice the purchasing power than the Czech Republic sinceeverything’s so cheap over there in comparison. I wasn’t to know that thedeath rate was marginally higher there though, so it was probably a good thingthat I stayed no longer than three days.

Timelines :

Specify a date anywhere from 100,000 B.C. to 2,000 A.D. and if Britannica hassomething to say, you’re sure to know about it. As you’d expect, there’s moreinformation present as time gets more recent. I took a look at the inceptionof CDs in 1980 and DVD in 1995, but there are plenty of topics to choose fromincluding Music, Science, Religion and Art.

Not every last piece of information is clickable-upon to find out more, butthere must be extra information for over 90% of them.

Spotlights :

The Multimedia section. The box is right when it says this brings knowledgeto life and makes learning fun. Video and animation can be viewed time andtime again and the DVD-ROM version contains five hours of it, compared to thesingle hour that the CD-ROM Deluxe gets to see.

Britannica.com :

As the heading suggests, this is the official website for Britannica.From here you can link to over 125,000 Internet websites, get a free emailaddress, create your own homepage hosted by Britannica, get technical supportadvice and obtain advance notice on upgrades and get savings on Britannicaproducts.

As if that wasn’t enough, the package also contains the New Oxford Dictionaryof English for when u justt can’t spel a wurd; Bookmarks allow youto save your latest discoveries and go back to them whenever you like, whilethe Notes and Research Assistant options are more instrumentalin helping you piece together all that information you need for your essayat a moment’s notice.

The following table gives a complete breakdown of what you can expect fromall three versions available for Britannica 2000 :

Click on image for fullscreen version.

Graphics, Sound and Ease of Use

The graphics are crisp and clear with colour just right when it’s needed,with easy-to-read text. Obviously I haven’t been able to get through the entireBritannica yet, but what I have seen provides fluid animation and I can findno fault with it.

The sound is also very good and what’s here suits the package well, but it’snot the latest aurally-powerful first-person-shooter, so don’t expect yourspeakers to be blown apart.

In the main, Encyclopaedia Britannica DVD 2000 is very easy to use.However, when I installed it I hit a few snags. After it rebooted the machineand began to “adjust system settings”, which strikes fear into my heart at thebest of times, it reported some files (mainly driver .dll’s) as “missing orcorrupted”. Presumably that was the reason behind IE 5.0 (Internet ExplorerVersion 5.0) not working the way that it should, resulting in me not beingable to copy and paste text when I should, or accessing some of the highlightedlinks within the text.

One thing that was a pain was having to install IE 5.0 in the first place.Even if it’s 100% necessary, I wanted to install it to a different drive butit went ahead without asking and dumped it on the C: drive where I’ve preciouslittle space as it is, but I have stacks of space on the D: and E: drives.As a result it refuses to uninstall IE 5.0 and return to the previous versionbecause it’s missing the setup.stf file it needs.

Click on image for fullscreen version.

Overall

A very comprehensive package as you’d expect and it’s the best source ofinformation you’re likely to come across, short of taking a ride throughthe circuits of history with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,but it’s not without its faults as described above.

If you’re after some more info on Britannica, you can checkout their official Website atBritannica.com

and enter the competition online from the left-hand menu.

CONTENT
GRAPHICS
SOUND AND MUSIC
EASE OF USE
ENJOYMENT



OVERALL