Usenet Explorer

First: Laptop with Intel T8100, 3 GB Ram

Now, does anyone have a working memory or header setup that will allow natural retention of large NG's (I want all the MP3 and DVD movie groups) and will allow more than 2 streams/groups to be fetching headers at the same time without constant and long pauses while the program mercilessly pounds the hard drive?

IIRC "natural" retention in UE can only be achieved by using article numbers when subscribing to newsgroups.
Since article numbers type can have prolly less than 14-17M headers in 1G, you might get some issues with 3G of memory, but Alex wrote that "compact binary group type" should hold 100-200M headers for 1G.
I'm using mostly that and a quick overview on my side says UE is using 1.7G (Working set) for roughly 330M headers, although I didn't restarted it since 24days and I like to keep all groups open
Maybe Natural retention is not a wise option... for large newgroups.