We engineers have long suffered from the confusion resulting from the regretable fact that powers of two are not also powers of ten. The IEEE has a draft standard "Standard Prefixes for Binary Multiples" http://www.ieee802.org/secmail/pdf00106.pdf that would clear up the nomenclature surrounding multiplication by 2^(10n). Unfortunately, I can't quite get myself to utter "kibibyte" without thinking of dog snacks. Here's an excerpt from the Draft standard, in the "Applications" section: * * * * Q: The formatted capacity of my hard drive seems smaller than what was ordered. Why? A: Your operating system assumes that 1 MB equals 1 048 576 bytes. Drive manufacturers consider 1 MB as equal to 1 000 000 bytes. Thus if the drive is advertised as 6.4 gigabytes (6 400 000 000 bytes) the operating system sees it as approximately 6.1 GB. [(6 400 000 000)/(1 048 576 000) = 6.1035...]. Thane Plambeck 650 321 4884 office 650 323 4928 fax http://www.qxmail.com/home.htm