Street Atlas USA 2003

3 3 out of 5 stars | 20 ratings

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Last update: 08-14-2024


Top reviews from the United States

Barry S.
3.0 out of 5 stars A mixed bag for a title with a good history.
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2002
This was a tough one. I saw all the awful reviews and wondered, should I even bother with this product? So I bought it, and a few days later I'm still not sure I like it, but it is functional. I find myself using both the new and the old side by side. SA 2003 is both good and bad.
Pluses:
The map data is better. However, it's not perfect. Even the latest data Delorme has still isn't up to where local street maps are. However, there is a "fix." This version of Street Atlas allows you to add the roads. (It's not hard with a GPS log to generate a fairly accurate representation of the road.) So you can fill in the gaps with a little driving around.
The addition of points of interest, restaurants, hospitals, and radio stations directly to the map is neat. The data is mostly accurate and somewhat helpful even if only moderately complete.
There is a lot more functionality in SA 2003. You can have multiple routes, multiple layers of draw objects, multiple waypoint files, (all at once) and it makes usage rather complicated. It's almost like AutoCAD in the layers respect. It's going to send many users into overload - almost guaranteed. If you liked the overall simplicity of the previous versions, you're going to hate this one. There should probably be an hour DVD showing how to make best use to the program included in the packaging.
There are a lot of search options. The ability to find places within a window, city, by name, zip code, lat/lon, etc. is great. Unfortunately, the options combined with the "new" interface makes it a little too cumbersome for most people.
Reliability is good. It hasn't crashed yet.
Minuses:
The interface is awful. (I'm still on the fence as to how awful it is. Half of me hates it and the other half is starting to tolerate it.) It's non-standard and somewhat non-intuitive. You should read all the help files TWICE before realistically trying to use the program, especially if you've used a previous version of Street Atlas. Whoever wrote the UI forgot the cardinal rule of Windows programming, a familiar interface improves the user experience.
I've read the reviews about it being slow. It's not as fast as previous versions, but it's far from being arduously slow. Be sure to copy the data files to the hard drive. (Stick Data CD in and run setup from that CD.) It improves speed. The killer is the GPS. Do not turn on the GPS for tracking or real time locating unless you're not doing anything else with the computer - my 1.2 Ghz Athlon w/ 512 MB of RAM was maxxed out (100% CPU utilization) trying this task. (Unclick every check box in the GPS Options dialog area.) You will likely be disappointed if this is your primary mapping program in your car if nothing else, due to the excess CPU utilization, it may feel very sluggish. However, in normal home usage, locating places and scrolling through maps without GPS, CPU usage rarely topped 50% and usually stayed below 10%. Once you have a route and everything else setup where you won't be interacting with the computer, then you can initialize and run the GPS and not be too annoyed. (Just don't try to make changes at this point.) I'm not exactly sure why this occurs, but careful use of accepting GPS data seems to solve most problems.
I did not test the microphone portion where you can ask it where you are. So I cannot "speak" to how well that works.
Verdict: The program has an awful, "new" interface, good information with lots of flexibility, and is fine speed-wise as long as you're not using it for real-time mapping with a GPS while typing a letter. And if you're a technophobe - you're going to hate it because it's non-standard and there will be somewhat of a learning curve. If you're planning to be sitting in your car with your laptop and GPS, you may be happier with something less CPU intensive and simpler, like an older version of Street Atlas. However, if you're the adventuresome type whose not afraid of screwy non-standard interfaces - check out SA 2003. It offers a lot.
Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars This At las is out of date and is not ...
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2018
This At las is out of date and is not compatible any of the window programs I use in my business operations.
Please be more specific in explaining to purchasers that STREET 2003 US will not work with modern Window Programs. (BE SPECIFIC).

THANK YOU!
Vivona
2.0 out of 5 stars Not For Planning Vacations
Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2002
If you are looking for door-to-door routing software that doesn't require you to be online, then Street Atlas 2003 (SA2003) is for you. It handles routing quickly and accurately and the road database is extensive. But, if you are looking for travel planning software to plan a vacation or to replace AAA Map'n'Go (the vacation planner that Delorme has discontinued), then you will be very disappointed.
SA2003 adopted the non-standard user interface that Delorme already uses with TopoUSA. While it does eliminate dialog boxes appearing over the map display, it takes quite a while to find your way around and seems limited in scope. The navigation bar at the right of the screen takes more screen area than it needs to.
To route door-to-door, you can enter a starting point either by entering an address or by clicking on the map. You can enter stops along the way and designate the final destination. The calculated route can be printed out as turn-by-turn written directions and various maps, including strip maps and turn-by-turn maps. Only major highways are shown in color, making the maps harder to follow than Map'n'Go's. The turn-by-turn maps result in lot of duplication because many intersections, particularly Interstate interchanges, are treated as a series of separate turns so you get four or five identical turn-by-turn maps each with directions for a tiny portion of the intersection.
If you want to plan a vacation, SA2003 fails miserably compared to the discontinued Map'n'Go. Delorme's Map'n'Go contained essentially the entire AAA Tourbook database of tourist attractions and accommodations, each with several paragraphs of detailed information, including address, phone, description, hours of operation, how long to allow for the visit, admission or rates and AAA ratings. Planning a vacation was a breeze and the program quickly calculated routes and provided excellent directions and maps. Though routing was from the nearest major street, instead of door-to-door, that was fine for vacation planning. You could ask Map'n'Go to show you all points-of-interest along a route and in seconds you would have a complete list, including a narrated slide show to watch. Not so with SA2003 which, sometimes after many minutes of processing, provides only the phone number (but no address) of each point-of-interest.
Where Map'n'Go nicely displayed accommodations and points-of-interest on the map, SA2003, because there are so many points, only shows tiny dots at all but the most zoomed-in maps. I used to use Map'n'Go to filter the lodging symbols to show only lodging at a certain price and AAA rating to quickly find the best price for a given quality level. With no lodging detail, you simply can't do this with SA2003. Other Map'n'Go features missing from SA2003 are routing for Canada and Mexico and downloadable road construction and weather information.
Unfortunately, SA2003 makes up for less points-of-interest quality with more quantity - over 4 million. Unless you want to know of every bar, nail salon, ATM, dance studio, car dealer, etc., you will find SA2003 to contain far too many points-of-interest, all with no detailed information for travel planning. You can limit searches to certain categories, but even that results in an overload. Searching for "Amusement and Recreation" within a 10 mile radius of San Francisco resulted in over 1,500 places, including every karate studio, night club, video arcade, bowling center, etc. For me, over 80% of the results were useless. You can further limit searches by using keywords, but even then you end up with excessive quantity with no detailed information. Unfortunately, I found many points-of-interest categorized wrong. For instance, the leasing office of an office building was listed as an amusement.
No matter how you intend to use SA2003, you will find its most glaring weakness is the time it takes to search for points-of-interest, particularly along a route. I set up a 1,500-mile route from San Francisco to Astoria, Oregon and searched for points-of-interest within 2 miles of the route. The search took twenty-five minutes! The majority of the resulting 2,284 points-of-interest were of no use to the vacation planner. Every along-the-route search test I tried took 15 to 30 minutes to run. Checking System Monitor showed the CPU running slammed at 100%. This was on an 800MHz PC with 256MB of RAM. I tried the same tests on a 733MHz PC with 384MB of RAM with similar results. These excessive search times make SA2003 extremely frustrating and impractical to use. Worse yet, if you don't print out the results or save them to a separate text file, you lose them when you exit SA2003.
Delorme could greatly enhance SA2003 for the vacation planner by changing the install program to allow the user to install only those point-of-interest categories that they want. For instance, I would only install accommodations, tourist attractions and a few others. That would result in a substantially smaller database, which (I hope) would greatly speed up searches. Delorme could further enhance SA2003 by making a special travel planning database available that contained the type of detailed AAA information that was available in Map'n'Go.
I do not use mapping software with a GPS so I did not check this feature with SA2003, though it did look comprehensive.
If Map'n'Go was still available, I would immediately return SA2003 and buy the latest Map'n'Go. For now, I will continue to use my 2001 version of Map'n'Go 7 for vacation planning and just use SA2003 to verify the routing. If another company comes up with a decent vacation planning package, I would drop Delorme as quickly as they dropped Map'n'Go! I hope a better solution comes along before the information in Map'n'Go becomes too outdated.

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