Property make-overs are still fairly popular. It does not matter whether you admire the courage of those who make their property available or wonder at their foolhardiness, there are still plenty of willing volunteers for the various reality television programs that carry out home "improvements". Of course, for those who do not want this particular form of limelight and prefer starting from scratch, there is the DIY route. Offering to help is Home Design Architectural Series developed by Punch Software and available from FastTrak.

Consisting as it does of eighteen programs, you would expect Home Design's installation procedure to be time consuming and you would not be wrong. The file copying process took the best part of 15 minutes on a 350MHz Pentium II system running Windows 98. An online user guide in Adobe Acrobat format is available just in case you mislay the 300 page printed version.

As mentioned earlier, Home Design consists of eighteen programs, although modules would perhaps be a more appropriate term, that have been combined into a single application. Home Design's main interface has a CAD-style look to it. A central design area is surrounded by various tool bars. There are specific tool bars for previews, guides, annotation and power activities such as photo view, estimating cost and importing/exporting DXF files. A row of tabs allow you to switch between the different layers of your plans and, in some cases, this will change the tool bars that are present.

For example selecting the Landscape tab brings up a Landscape tool bar. Starting with the foundations, you can create a floor plan with electrical, air ducts and plumbing features in place. Home Design provides a range of precision drawing tools that help in the exact placement of doors, windows and the like. These items can be dragged from a preview bar and have the dimensions automatically displayed. Walls and roofing sections can be constructed using a variety of textures.

Options are available to view a 2D plan and/or 3D representation of the design either in full or split screen mode. When using 3D mode, rendering is generally quick. You can alter the viewing angle to see the building from different sides but this does tend to be rather hit or miss and can result in a severe case of the jaggies when the building is portrayed on-screen.

Home Design does suffer somewhat from an identity crisis. Its price point, packaging and ability to create a cut-out model of your work mark it down as a product for an amateur designer. Yet the program's power and complexity, without the aid of a tutorial, seems more suited to the professional architect.

Price: £89.99 Manufacturer: Map & Travel Website: www.fasttrak.co.uk Required Spec: Windows 95 or later, 64Mb RAM, 820Mb hard disk