Average Rating: 
Rating:  - ...but was the upgrade worth it?
Last year Streets and Trips changed my travel life almost as much as retirement. That was version 2002, and my travel year was routinely enhanced by good route suggestions, precise mileages, and accurate arrival estimations. Don't think I've ever used software that was easier to figure out, with basic functions obvious, and special features easy to implement with just a little effort. Optimizing stops takes a while, but it should, for the calculations are not trivial and the solutions are good. It was an unexpected bonus to often be able to locate services such as restaurants and motels. Of course the software mislocated my house, left me in limbo trying to find a Microsoft workshop in Madison, had no idea how to get from Farmington, NM to Chaco Canyon, and was clueless about the relative efficiency of lesser paved roads in unpopulated places. All our interstate travel proceded as predicted, but our rural progress in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states was usually much faster than the software suggested. Not surprisingly, commerce is rather better supported than scenery. National and state park maps seem generally poor, and information on topography disappears as you zoom in before you reach a resolution where it could be really useful. Promise of "all new map content" got me to upgrade to the 2003 version. So was it worth it? Yes and no. It can find my house now, and some others that were previously mislocated. It finds a plausible route from Farmington to Chaco Canyon, and even beyond to points south. But it still does not connect two-track roads between Utah and Nevada, and shows inexplicable disconnections on forest roads in Lower Michigan. Such gaps seem trivial, but unless you stay on the good highways, they prevent you from using Streets and Trips to document your travel and may even mislead a trusting person into going far out of the way to avoid a non-problem. If you go into the boondocks, you'd better have something like the DeLorme state road atlases. The Streets and Trips of my dreams would understand that you can average 60 on many minor roads out west, would show the topography critical to travel decisions in inclement weather, and would allow you to repair map errors or obsolescence well enough to display your travel over unsupported routes.
Rating:  - A Step Backward
If you have an earlier version of Streets and Trips, i.e., 2001 or 2002, keep using it and don't spend your money on this one. I've been using the 2001 version for the past couple years and have found it to be quite helpful. I received the 2003 version as a Christmas gift and decided to install it on Christmas day.After the install, I kept receiving a message telling me that I must accept the end user license agreement to use the product. The problem was that the end user license agreement (EULA) did not appear. Wonderful. The message said to reinstall. I did. It still didn't work. Contacted Microsoft, on Christmas no less. The follwing day I did have a response, which in the end got me past the problem and Streets and Trips 2003 finally started. So credit is due the Microsoft tech who assisted in this matter. Of course, I had to do a registry hack to accomplish this, which I'm sure all of you are familiar with. After typing in some simple addresses to see if Streets and Trips 2003 found them, which it did, I tried a few more obscure addresses. It didn't locate any of them. But the 2001 version had no problem finding them. Hmmm...somethings not quite right here. Bottom line: if this is the only version you have, good luck. If you have an earlier version, keep using it. Maybe things will get fixed in the 2004 version.
Rating: - Inferior to the 2002 version
I have used Streets and Trips extensively in my business travel over the past several years, updating annually. I found the new versions to offer improvements, if often limited ones, until the current version. While I have found some new streets on the 2003 version, it no longer shows many of the hotels that were shown on the 2002 version, including several that I located originally using Streets and Tips. I think overall, it is a step backwards.
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