The CD-ROM is one of the top accessories for the home PC, and encyclopedias are usually one of the first CD-ROM titles to purchase. In the US, sales of CD-ROM encyclopedias exceed those of paper-based ones and if you have a CD-ROM equipped computer the advantages are obvious. A computerised encyclopedia brings you sound and video alongside the ordinary encyclopedia's text, and it makes searching and cross-references easy to perform. It also tends to be considerably cheaper than many paper encyclopedias (if you don't count the cost of the computer and CD-ROM drive you bought in the first place).

Microsoft has a well-deserved name for producing some of the best CD-ROM titles in the industry - its production values have consistently been ahead of the rest and when it came out with the first Encarta disc in 1993 it led the field in the glossiness of its presention. Of course, the quality of the content is paramount in an educational disc, but it doesn't matter how fact packed a disc is if it isn't appealling enough to make you want to pull it off of the shelf.

Encarta 1995 delivers a number of impressive improvements on its predecessor. It has a new, Windows95-style interface which takes a little getting used to for die-hard Windows 3.1 users but is arguably more logical. It is much more easily customised than its predecessors - you can choose the size of the text displayed and even change the layout on the "page" to a limited extent to favour text or pictures. The information finding feature, now dubbed the "Pinpointer" has also been enhanced.

The volume of multimedia data available is also impressive - more than 8,000 pictures and graphics, almost nine hours of sound, 29 videos and 100 minutes of video and animation. Five new "Interactivities" have been added (for a total of six) - these are interactive guides to personal nutrition, fractals, immigration and other subjects.

So with all of this, surely Encarta gets a hearty thumbs up? Not really, no. Unfortunately, although Microsoft claims that it has changed or revised more than a third of its more than 26,000 articles and added more than 300 further ones, including pieces on the ANC and the Hubble telescope, it remains a deeply parochial text in many places. Recent British politics is scarcely touched on. John Major has his own entry this year, but it is only 136 words long - less than a third of the size of Bill Gates' entry, for example - and Bill gets a picture and a short speech. Even more insultingly, Encarta still maintains that John Smith is the leader of the Labour party - yet doesn't provide an entry for him (or Blair, or even Kinnock).

British scientific and engineering prowess is also slighted - once again, poor Logie Baird fails to get a mention - according to Encarta, "The first truly successful television pickup devices were the iconoscope , which was invented by the Russian-born American physicist Vladimir Kosma Zworykin in 1923, and the image dissector tube, invented by the American radio engineer Philo Taylor Farnsworth shortly thereafter". Between them, Sir Marc Isambard Brunel and Isambard Kingdom Brunel merit less than a hundred words. Even our royal family, which you might expect the Americans to find interesting, receives very little coverage. Prince Charles gets a picture and 182 words, while Princess Diana gets just a short mention in his mini-biography.

The inclusion of a dictionary and thesaurus is a nice touch, but it, too, proves as chauvenistic as it was when it was introduced on the first disc - "colour" is merely a chiefly British variant of "color" and "the word 'flavour' is not found".

If you are prepared to overlook these deficiencies, Encarta remains quite an appealling product and although its coverage can be sketchy, as we've seen, it usually has at least something to say about everything under the sun. It is worth noting that the main competition to date, the Grolier's Encyclopedia, is also an American product. We hope to be able to bring you a review of the latest version of its disc next issue, along with a look at the new Hutchison's Encyclopedia, a new and (hopefully) much-enhanced version of the only available British multimedia encyclopedia.

If you can afford to wait a year there may be even better news to come - Microsoft is aware that Encarta needs localisation, and is hiring people to do just that through the year. I hope that this involves more than just running a UK spelling checker through the text and giving the voice-overs in a RADA accent instead of an American one. To its credit, Microsoft is offering existing Encarta owners £30 off the price of the current one - an offer I would expect them to extend when they next upgrade Encarta towards Christmas 1995.