I use VIEW a lot as it's simple; just type your letter and when finished, save it if you want and print. I very rarely use any of its editing facilities.

STOP PRESS 64 is also quite straightforward and, with the help of a good selection of clipart from Moss PD (and a fair few fonts as well) some very natty newsletters can be produced.

My printer is a Star LC100 80 colour 9 pin dot matrix and I bought it because one of the big computer mags said it was the best budget colour printer you could buy and was certainly equal in quality to similar priced mono printers. I bought it mail order from Crown Computers for £95 and £10 carriage. With VAT it still came to less than £125. Personally, I have never tested its colour capabilities but its black and white graphics are very good. When David, my three year old, gets a bit older and starts school, I will probably invest in an A3010 or similar and then I should be able to give it a good testing.

The AP2 inside my PLUS 1 is very handy for managing roms and SWR and for formatting/verifying disks. ADT comes into its own for moving things from one filing system to another and also for backing up. ADI is of limited use but, as I've already said, if you have a backup protected disk (as some BBC DFS disks are) it lets you back them up and also make a copy of a 40T disk to an 80T disk. With normal backup procedures, this is not possible.

Overall, I should say I prefer ADFS on 3.5" disk as this seems more reliable and makes better use of disk space. Certainly, if you arrange disks in menu format, the ability to put directories within directories is very useful. 31 files or directories can be very limiting. However, cheap BBC software can often be found at car boot sales and the like, so it helps to have DFS and a 5.25" drive to make use of this. I usually then convert such disks to ADFS 3.5" and keep the originals as a backup.

Hopefully this info will be of some use and if I can help anyone further I will be quite happy to do so as best I can.

John Crane, EUG #21