These are our most frequently asked questions.

If you can't find what you're looking for here then try our Help pages.

If you chose to order the software on physical media (CD-ROM) then we charge extra for the production and distribution. Currently this is £5.00 for UK destinations and £10.00 for International destinations. Sorry, but the admin overheads of shuffling plastic around the world rather than electrons is too high for us to write it off.

All prices include postage and UK VAT, and physical media will be sent by recorded delivery.

We will also accept payment by cheque as long as it's payable in UK Pounds Sterling (GBP).

You can see more detail on these, together with instructions on how to order by following any of the Order Now links.

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, 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 the additional components increase the size of the download considerably! If you have a broadband Internet connection then the download times should not be excessive. However, if you use a dial-up line for your Internet access this will increase the download times. In this case you may want to consider ordering the physical media (CD-ROM) instead of the Online option.

If you have the following then you should be OK:

Minimum System Requirements:

• Microsoft Windows XP (Home or Professional)

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.

In addition, you will require hard disk space for your collection databases. The actual amount will depend on the number of collectables you have and how much information you add. As a rough rule-of-thumb, you will need around 1Mb per 1,000 collectables.

We have full conversion from Collect-IT Version 1.x to Collect-IT Version 2.0. However, because version 2 is vastly different to version 1 we can't guarantee that there won't be some "touch up" work to do but this should be minimal, if any.  

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.

If you do have very large collections there are a number of things we can do to speed up load times, if it becomes a problem. Try it first and then drop us a mail.

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.

Drop us a mail with an example attached to help@collect-it.biz and we'll see what we can do. We may have to charge you, depending on how complicated it is, but we won't do that without contacting you first. 

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. If it won't run you'll get your money back without any quibbles.