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If you've got a reasonably punchy PC, and fifty quid burning a hole in your pocket then this is for you - Microsoft's latest AutoRoute Express
Just released on CD ROM, both the UK and the European variants are packed with advanced features. Both will work out the quickest or shortest route between towns and cities, as well as calculating your fuel costs and average times. AutoRoute even tells you at what part of your journey you will need to refuel. This is assuming that you can tell it how many miles to the gallon or litres per 100 km your vehicle will cover, and how big the fuel tank is.
Then it will print and itinerary, and a map - in colour. AutoRoute sports a good range of colour photographs of major cities. It also comes with disappointingly few 360-degree panoramic photographs. One such image in the GB version gives the user the illusion of standing in the middle of Piccadilly Circus whilst turning slowly around. Clever stuff! It even allows you to look up and down - Please Mr. Gates, can we have some more?
First serious problem for many users is that AutoRoute needs Windows 95 or Windows NT. It won't run on the old Windows 3.11. It also likes lots of memory - in real terms at least 16 MB. And despite being a CD ROM based product, the European version will gobble up a staggering 50 MB hard disk space if you select the full - supposedly high speed installation
AutoRoute is a technically very sophisticated piece of software, but the business traveller needs to ask, "How useful is it?"
Visually, AutoRoute is very attractive - if a little slow even when run on a competent PC. I asked it to plan a route between Southampton City Centre and downtown Berlin. It produced an excellent itinerary, telling me in detail where to turn, and what road to take. Unfortunately, it took nearly five minutes to do its sums. Moreover, simply redrawing maps as you scroll about the Continent takes painful and rather irritating seconds.
Whilst many computer Boffins reckon that it won't be long before a PC boasting a 133Mhz Pentium type processor and 32 Megabytes of RAM running Windows NT will become a fairly standard platform for Windows PC's. It is still a relatively fast machine by today's standard and one could reasonably expect AutoRoute to perform much more quickly than it does.
Pretty and very easy to use, AutoRoute may nevertheless confuse some users because, despite being produced by the developers of Windows, its Menus differ greatly from normal Windows products such as Microsoft Office or Corel WordPerfect.
Retailing in the UK about £50 each, AutoRoute is a well-engineered piece of kit - so long as you have a PC with enough muscle to run it. The European version is particularly well stocked with information, and its road maps will take you well behind the former Iron Curtain. Both the UK and European versions are, however, somewhat lacking in detail once you start zooming in - and many minor roads are left off altogether.
More info on AutoRoute, check out Microsoft's WebSite on http://www.microsoft.com.