Why, when conpared to PC is the Mac so slow on downloading headers and rar file from giagnews while my PC's are much faster. I've used serveral hareware programs and have purchased two. Hogwasher and don't remember the other. Both are slow. Does the Mac OS dislike those type of files downlaods from newsgroups. All other aspect with the Mac works fine. What gives, any expalnation, guy?
Sorry, I stopped using USENET when the science groups were hijacked, ending free access to experts. However, someone here surely knows. I'll start by taking a guess.
Giganews has such bandwidth that it has compressed the headers especially for Windows. 'Winrar' is commercial & proprietary, optimized for Windows's NTFS.
There is one other small quirk I can think of. If Winrar produces many little files, you should know that HFS+ on MacOSX 10.4+ has a little quirk when writing files smaller than that 20 MiB. The writing of each is delayed until a contiguous region on the disk large enough to hold it is found. This might have an effect if many little files are written. (This has proved great for recovering photos, though.-)
In other words, I really haven't a clue.
Are you using Giganews's accelerator to speed the viewing of headers? People have long been clambering for a Mac version; but I still see only a Windows one. Mac user have therefore been using a Windows server to decode & decompress Giganet's headers for their Macs:
My ISP offers Giganews: I just don't use it. Sorry. It used to be great, especially for those with only modems. (The group sci.geo.geology used to be great for students in 3d-World countries.)
