Encarta Premium Suite claims a base of 130,000+ articles, along with 25,300+ photos and illustrations and 1.8 million map locations. That's more than a bit of bedtime reading, although of course there are really only two reasons why people buy digital encyclopedias these days -- either they've got kids to educate, or they're after some verifiable and quotable facts for a research project. For almost anyone else, of course, there's Google. Encarta does supplement its article base with online search capabilities, but these are managed through MSN <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region>'s search engine.

Two bits of quick advice: If you're keen on Encarta 2005, buy the DVD version - much less painful than swapping around four CDs for the install -- and if you can at all spare the space, install the whole thing to your hard drive, as that'll eliminate any future disc swapping to read additional content.

Encarta installs itself as a number of discrete components, all naturally built on an Internet Explorer shell, and it's Windows-only material, despite the existence of Mac Internet Explorer. Strangely enough, the rounded style they've chosen for Encarta makes it look somewhat like a Mac OS X product. The component-based model works well in a research sense, as it allows you to dip into packages such as the dictionary (which by default installs itself to the system tray), as well as launching either the full Encarta package or the new Children's Encarta. Microsoft offers a year's Encarta updates if you register with the service; when we did so around 4.5MB of updates were available.

Searching Encarta 2005 worked smoothly enough, through both the simple children's Encarta (which supplements the rather more dry articles with games and other distracting activities) and the main encyclopedia, and it's relatively simple to copy information to other documents, although all of them will come with a mandatory Microsoft copyright notice. You can use the inbuilt researcher tool to build reports, although on most system running Windows XP SP2, you'll hit an interesting conundrum, as it will by default tell you not to run the ActiveX control that the researcher tool requires.