I can remember when my software collection comprised a handful of cassettes, which were left lying around by my old Dragon 32 and all I had to do was quickly glance through them to find the program I wanted. Now I have got three trays of cassettes and two boxes of discs and it used to take me hours to find a particular game or utility program.

Having typed up my cassette collection into several databases only to find that they were full before I had entered everything and then they used to print out one under the other wasting three quarters of my paper, I despaired of even starting to enter my entire disc collection.

Pulser Software have come up with the answer in Diskbase, written by Bill Tarrant. On Sunday morning, I loaded fnrhe Help Screen and then followed with the Menu. Starting with the Create screen I was prompted to input whether I was using one drive or two.

As I have two drives I was able to leave my blank disc in Drive 2 while I inserted my program discs into Drive 1. After 20 minutes the information was on the working disc for all my 56 dull discs. I then used the alphabetical sort, which took another 45 minutes. This may sound a long time but there were 647 different entries to be sorted, not including Menus, which are automatically left out by Diskbase.

During this time you can go away and do other jobs while the computer carries on with the 'shell sort', When sorted, I printed out the full list which filled up three sheets of printer paper even though they were laid out over four columns. This has to be better than twelve sheets with most databases. Whenever I wish I can add to the database, and there are numerous options open to me. My printout is alphabetical with the name of the disc after it (you can use five characters including spaces to name your disc) but I would list out only Basic or only binary if I wished. A search can be made for any letters in it, eg PAC would find SPACE WARS and PACMAN, or you can list what is on any particular disc. All listings can be made either to the screen or the printer. It took me 1 hour 10 minutes to enter everything into the database and print out an alphabetical listing. Other databases would need keying in, and I do not know another database for the Dragon that could handle 216,000 entries (600 entries for each letter and each number).

At £2.99 this has got to be a real snip and I would advise all disc owners to purchase it, I would certainly not recommend piracy of it!!! Quite apart from the usual reason, you are told on-screen to use the original only, and there is a reason: illegal copying will lead to the loss of your copy. Do not worry: no problem is incurred when you use the copy you have bought, and anyway, the original is duplicated on the other side of the Flippy on which it comes.

This program has got to be worth five Dragons at this price.