It's amazing how times change. When we were growing up, our parents had to pry us away from the computer to do our homework. Now, staying at the computer is the best way to get almost anything done. Kids today have study advantages unmatched by any in history—something a certain software juggernaut wants to capitalize on with Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2008. This $49.95 software package is aimed at helping students at all grade-school levels get their studying, research, and writing done in one fell swoop. And in terms of content, it's a success: Microsoft has combined its Encarta encyclopedia, dictionaries, thesaurus, and atlas with its high-quality, low-profile number cruncher,. The suite's videos, style guides, and templates cover all the educational bases.

Jan 24, 2016 - An archive of the single-disc Microsoft Encarta 97, which I got from WinWorldPC.

Encarta alone is a veritable reference bookshelf. Its tens of thousands of articles provide a broad survey course of human history and experience.

Hundreds of book summaries cover works from Chinua Achebe to Paul Zindel. Foreign-language tools let you look up and translate words, or even conjugate tricky verbs in Spanish, French, German, or Italian. It also provides a number of videos (some in association with the Discovery Channel) that illustrate natural phenomena like volcanoes and comets, or cultural concepts like cartoon animation and New York City skyscrapers. Some of the features that most impressed us were the virtual 3D 'tours' around ancient sites such as the Acropolis in Athens or the Roman Coliseum, and 360-degree panoramas of various places, from the Taj Mahal to Mars. Internet integration is also strong, with links to college, test-prep, and career-training resources online, as well as a free subscription to MSN Encarta Premium (for even more up-to-date information and articles). What we liked less was the software's organization. Roxio Easy Cd Creator Windows Xp.

The menus require a fair amount of drilling to navigate and are strangely unintuitive for what seems like a sensible layout. A search field at the top of the Encarta window does help alleviate confusion, but we found no easy way to just browse everything that's at your virtual fingertips.

The only way to really find anything is to know you're looking for it, and we've seldom found ourselves more interested in learning than when we're permitted to explore as we see fit. (Learning Essentials, an included companion program aimed at younger students, seemed considerably less labyrinthine.) But for all its benefits, Microsoft Student with Encarta 2008 is ultimately a tie-in product, too. If you don't have Microsoft Office XP, Office 2003, or Office 2007 installed, you'll miss out on a lot. Dozens of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint templates and integrated tutorials, which help with everything from writing book reports to presenting a science project, comprise a key set of features we're not sure should only be the province of families who can afford Microsoft's productivity suite.