CompuServe Thread

Steve, You were caught between a rock and a hard place. You had already spend the 3 hrs connect time, but now have nothing to show for it, but by the same token, didn't want to spend more time downloading it. I downloaded it at 2400 baud in 50 minutes, and friend downloaded it in 1.75 hrs at 1200 baud, but we both did it late at night. Depending on system usage, the times can vary widely. The best way to determine how long a file is going to take is to figure out how big it is and what the baud rate is. The size is no problem…it's given in the description of the file as the number inside the parenthesis (or if only 1 number..then the number itself). Now this number is always a little high, but is a good starting place. Divide that number by 128 and you get the number of Xmodem blocks or divide by 512 and you get the number of B-Protocol blocks approxitmately. Under ideal conditions (very rare!) you can get 1 block of Xmodem (128bytes + 4 or 5 protocol bytes) in about 1.2 seconds. Double that. and you'll get an approxitmation of time under fair to poor conditions. Under heavy usage…it might be slower, under low usage, it will be faster. To get an idea of system usage, before the download, do a UST. Look at how many folks are in ACCESS. If a large number, it would be a good idea to wait. The best time is usually after 1:00am Eastern time. So, if the number in parenthesis shows the file to be 128,000 bytes long, it will take about 1000 Xmodem blocks to download it. At 1.2 seconds per block that would be 1200 seconds. Doubling makes that 2400 seconds or 40 minutes. So the 3 hrs time must have been during quite heavy usage as it was almost double my friend's time for the same download. The terminal program can also play a factor depending on how often it writes to the disk (this can easily double the time again if it writes every block it gets to disk as it gets it) so we suggest you download to RAM: and then copy to a disk. B-Protocol is generally 10 – 15 % faster in downloading. Don