hey thank you baldy....it must have been the mirror...i did a search w/ ggogle and found another download site...i tried to download it, but it said it would take 63hrs??? i have a cable internet provider, usually have pretty fast transfer rates....checked running processes to make sure nothing was draining my resources, and all was good....so now am in the process of buying knoppix through the mail just so i can get this "trip" as u referred to it, on it's way...which is what i wanted to avoid, wanted to do it all over the net...unless you can bail me out so i can do it all from download...how do i tell if an area has 700m available?...i have a brand new dell (i dont have the specs off hand but i upgraded everything....including memory (not just ram)...do u think u can help or will i be forced to wait for the postman???thank you very much for your time and help baldy/anyone else who might be able to help

p.s. am i using "distro" correctly?...does it just refer to different distributions???