Once Britannica has stopped trying to sell you things, it's a grand piece of software. Yet the box comes with leaflets for extra products, the lengthy installation routine sells you them too, and you're not even free of the advertising when you launch the program. A 'Shop Now' button on the opening screen is entirely unwelcome.

Now traditionally, the argument has always run that Britannica has the best content, yet Encarta has the best interface and is that bit more user-friendly. Yet, out of the 2005 versions of both, it's Britannica that has made the bigger strides forward, with a simple, easy to follow system of navigation that'll be familiar to anyone who's ever spent half an hour on the Internet.

From the off, it's happy to split its approach between its varying demographic audiences. So 6-10 year olds are invited to select the Elementary Library option, 10-14 year olds have the Student Library and everyone older has the Encyclopaedia Britannica 2005 Library to play with. To find out the differences, we searched for a couple of items under all three.

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Searching for 'football' got things off to a bad start. This is a product primarily targeted at an American audience it seems, as 6-10 year olds are given an admittedly simple definition of American Football. 10-14 year olds get a more detailed description, although multimedia elements are common. Bizarrely, for adults, football is defined in the British sense, with not an Americanism in sight.

'Bill Gates' under the adult version brought up a detailed biography of the Microsoft co-founder, yet clicking onto the multimedia button, the first two results were Iron Gates and The Gates of Hell. It got better. Under the Student Library, a search for Bill Gates proved tricky, with the first result up being Apple-man Steve Jobs. Gates appeared further down the list as William H Gates III. Bill Clinton was the first name out in the Elementary Library, with Bill Gates nowhere to be found. It was easier, in the Elementary Library, to find out about Monica Lewinsky!

These examples aside, the search is actually quite a powerful, if slow, tool, and it does get you to your desired content the vast majority of the time. You can also choose to browse through the included atlas, through the generous multimedia library and across features such as timelines.

To their credit, the developers also have differing options depending on which Library you're looking at. These, however, don't always go to plan - clicking on the Games button which appears in the Elementary and Student Libraries doesn't take you to games at all, rather to a Web page talking about learning activities relevant to the likes of Grades 6-12. From there you can get to the games if you want, but it's a shame that the content for the under-14s is very Americanised, yet if you're older then you can enjoy the localised material in the main library.

For make no mistake, the main Britannica Library is where this program hits top gear. The Brainstormer feature is the big new thing here, and it's designed to simply help you get around the thousands of topics contained with the program. For instance, we started by clicking on The Arts, then chose Architecture, then from the next menu down we plucked Gothic revival and all of a sudden we were reading about William Butterfield. Whichever route you choose, consistently the content is of a very high standard, and with over 100,000 articles and 18,000 pieces of multimedia, there's much to explore.

However, this is also the program's Achilles heel, as even on a 3GHz Pentium 4 PC, it had a hard job navigating between content entries at a decent pace. If you can put up with that, though, there's easily your money's worth here.