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Car Cure sets out to provide an expert mechanic at your shoulder. It offers information about vehicle diagnostics and routine maintenance. There are no graphics - just menus and screens of text and its publisher Simtron claims to have crammed in 300 symptoms, 90 parts and 900 faults.

Once the program's loaded you get a menu - symptoms or problems. Menu movement and selection is two-keyed, e.g. SHIFT and up/down arrow to move, and item selection by SHIFT and right arrow. Single key operation would be less clumsy.

Once you've made your selection another menu appears, this time of different areas such as: running engine, starting engine, electrical system, braking and so on. Selecting one of these takes you to a further list, such as: fuel leak, coolant leak, fuel consumption too high, etc.

Before any selection you can mark the menu item, which highlights it; later you can review the route you've taken - a clever and useful idea.

The bottom level in symptoms is a suggested remedy, e.g. check and adjust or replace as necessary, together with a difficulty rating and some comment like 'Garage - specialist equipment required' or 'A competent home mechanic can tackle this'. Of course, you may then have to refer to a workshop manual for procedures, and that will probably tell you as much, if not, more than, the program. And if you are a competent mechanic, would you be using Car Cure in the first place?

There are some nice touches, but an equal number of niggles. The screen isn't just cleared, but 'curtains' are drawn across. This may look nice but it's slow. You can hold down keys for fast menu traverse - just as well, as the keyboard response is otherwise rather slow and often misses. Text is redrawn too frequently - more delay.

The most unusual facilities, and certainly the most useful, are Trace and Ok. Trace is an extension of Mark and is used when you think a certain part may be at fault and want to check the symptoms that it might cause. Ok is used to exit from menus when you've checked them out and know they're not needed. And you can save and load fault diagnoses.

The main failing of programs like that is that a book can provide far more detail and you can literally have it to hand while you're at work. A vehicle's workshop manual describes how parts of a car work, how to dismantle, check and replace them and there are many fault-finders on sale. Car Cure just gives you a rough idea of what may be wrong, and requires a lot of prior knowledge - you've got to have a fair idea of what's wrong before you even start. However, of its type it's the best I've yet seen.