We don't do anything out of the ordinary. All the default settings such as date and currency formats are taken from your Windows Control Panel settings.

Unfortunately, whilst we don't do anything which would normally cause problems on older machines, the decision by Microsoft to stop supporting pre-XP operating systems means that we can sensibly only support Windows XP.

This doesn't mean that the software won't run on older machines, but without Microsoft support for Installers and the like we can't guarantee an easy time. If you want to give a go then please feel free, however we can't take support queries on anything other than XP. If it doesn't work we'll give you a refund so you have nothing to lose really.

The minimum system requirements for the application itself are quite low ... however, there are certain Windows components that must be present on your machine which raise the bar. In the vast majority of cases, with up-to-date Windows XP machines, you will probably have what is required, however we provide all the additional components you may need. These are freely distributable from Microsoft.

We do recommend you regularly run Windows Update to ensure you have the latest patches on your computer. You can find a link to the Windows Update site from your Control Panel / Automatic Updates, or from your Control Panel / Security Centre.

Please be aware that we only supply the software on CD-ROM. This is simply due to the physical size of the various components and associated download issues.

If you have the following then you should be OK:

Minimum System Requirements:

• Microsoft Windows XP (Home or Professional) with Service Pack 2

Minimum Hardware Requirements:

• Pentium 90 MHz* CPU
• 32 MB RAM**

* Or the minimum CPU required to run the operating system, whichever is higher.

** Or the minimum RAM required to run the operating system, whichever is higher.

Minimum Hard Disk Requirements:

The amount of hard disk space required is in the region of 40Mb for the installation files .. 99% of which is due to the Microsoft components we have to provide in case your machine doesn't have them.

We provide conversion utilities for this! We know that a lot of our current users have spent a long time documenting their collections, and there's no way we would force them to start again.

We've tested the software with 20,000 issues and the same number of items (i.e. 40,000 things in total). Obviously the more things you have the longer it takes to load them. Loading 40,000 elements should take less than 60 seconds (but this will depend on the specification of your machine and what else you have running at the time). Collections of less than 5,000 should load in 5 to 10 seconds, which will be fine for the vast majority of people.

Most spreadsheets tend to be very simple and, to be honest, the information is pretty well-known, so most imports should be fairly straight-forward.

We've done what we can to minimise problems with operating systems and environments, but there are so many variations that, much as we'd like to, we can't offer any guarantees.