Universalis Encyclopaedia 2009

The provided interface is quite racy
Universalis 2009 is the largest French language encyclopaedia. This new edition, the fourteenth release has 300 000 documents which cover pretty much everything known to humans, with the details on a subject being as exact as possible. Compared to previous versions, this new interface is easier to use and it a lot more intuitive thanks to its interactive index which references 100 000 entries. The organisation of the data, for sciences or technology, arts and literature, economics, law and sports provide you with a lot of links to relevant topics, making its use very practical.

A very exhaustive and accessible content
Teenagers or adults that are looking for in depth articles that are easily explained like biographies, summery documents, designs and schemas, statistics, encrypted data, photographs, 3D animations, videos, scientific experiments, slideshows, interactive media, musical extracts, audiovisual interviews, maps and dictionaries will find what they are looking for. The biggest surprise in this 2009 version is the power and precision of its remarkable search engine. This has been improved over time with the versions, becoming more relevant with each release.

Available on Mac and PC, CD or DVD
The newly purchased application is available for $200, in the form of a single DVD-ROM (5.59 GB) or alternatively as eight CD-ROM’s. Those that already own any of the previous releases (1 to 13) will also be able to purchase the upgrade version for $100. In terms of protection the package has a personal identification disk which the user will have to insert every 45 days. As for the hardware required to run the program, this edition requires either a PC (XP or Vista, 512 and 1 GB RAM) or MAC OS X 10.4 or higher (Power PC G4 1GHz/Intel Core 2 Duo, 512 MB RAM).

A 16/10 screen is recommended!
Having tested the Universalis 14 DVD on two equivalent systems with a Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM, and a GeForce 8800 GTS, we noticed that the full installation takes 11 on the MAC and a little more then 14 minutes on the PC! This can be done as either a full install (recommended) which takes a up a little less then 6GB of drive space or as a partial install which will use about 1.5 GB. In the second case, you will need to insert the CS/DVD to be able to view the large multimedia content. To be able to fully take advantage of the encyclopaedia, and to be able to especially view the text documents and atlas maps, it is preferable to have a large 16/9 or 16/10 screen that is ideally 20 or 24 inches (1920 x 1200).