At 07:59 AM 4/15/00 , you wrote: >Dear Sue, I'm still having trouble, it takes an hour, (57 min.) to down load >one file, then when I open it it takes another hr. to open. I feel sure it is >something I'm doing or not doing to cause this. Surely it isn't supposed to >take so long. I'll be gone for 2 weeks, so I'll work on it when I get back. >Thanks, Helynn Helynn .... you're not doing anything wrong -- the files are extremely large. I am on the state WAN and can download them in a few seconds. I have a 450 MHz Pentium processor, 256 Megs of main memory and a very fast hard drive. .... not bragging, just want to point out that, even with all that available to me, these files are still cumbersome at the least and virtually unusable in some instances (i.e. if I really want to do something with them). They are so large they will crash most word processors and spread sheet programs designed for a PC. Word seems to handle them okay, but because it is so humonguous in and of itself, it does not help the speed problem. They definitely are not for the faint of heart .... prepare to spend a _LOT_ of time waiting while you download them through a modem .... and again while your software grinds through all that data. Practice keeping them in their zipped format, unzipping only when you want to use them, to save on disk space. If you have a CD burner or a tape drive, that is probably the best way to archive them. What would be _GREAT_ is if the TDH could come up with an online, searchable database so that we wouldn't have to download everything. This would probably save them some "bandwidth" also. Tom Cloud <[email protected]>