Whether you're in a high income bracket and can afford to build a new home from scratch, or you just fancy rearranging your décor and getting some new furniture and fittings, Showhome 3D is designed to allow you to plan, construct and then walk round a 3D model of what your home could look like, before you have to dip your hand in your wallet.

In a sense, FastTrak has been beaten to the mark by The Sims 2, which allows you to do pretty much the same thing, except you then spoil your perfect homes by putting virtual families in them!

However, there are certain features of the FastTrak product that will instantly appeal to the serious home designer, not least of which is that you can bring your own floorplan (pre-scanning it to the format if necessary) and use it as the basis for your house.

It's imperative that you go through the tutorials to get the hang of the control and menu systems, as a lot of them are managed through holding down keyboard combinations. Frustratingly, you only know how to access the first tutorial by reading the enclosed manual, and once you finish that tutorial you have to come out of the program to read the other tutorials in the PDF manual which is contained in the Showhome 3D folder.

Fortunately, matters improve once you've established your floorplan to the right scale and worked out which way is North. From then on you can look at your dwelling from three camera angles (Plan view, Free view and First Person view) and start making use of the drop-down Wizards that will point you to all the essential elements to include.

So you start by choosing a basically furnished room type, dropping it on to your plan and then manoeuvring it to fit. As you add other rooms, they 'snap' into place with corresponding adjustments to wall thickness, etc., and then you can insert other doors and windows, light fittings and so on.

You progress on to micro-manage materials, decorations, colour schemes and styles until you feel everything is as you'd want it. The fun part is walking round each room - which you can do at any time - and having a very clear idea of what it will be like in reality. Changing, moving and deleting any feature is comparative child's play and you're encouraged to save often.

You can also interact with any item in your house, turning lights on and off, opening and shutting doors, pulling out drawers and opening blinds and curtains, all of which is useful for checking different lighting conditions in case a room is, say, south-facing. Once you've mastered the controls, you'd be surprised how quickly you can become engrossed.

Once you get to grips with the unfamiliar controls and not-so-friendly manual, the excellent tutorials will quickly have you designing a dream extension or house that you can then walk round and admire at ground level. This is Sims 2 without the annoying neighbours.