# Threshold Dialog Articles Seen & Unseen

The Threshold dialog allows you to determine how many articles WinVN will retrieve for the selected group. You can choose from the numbered buttons or enter the number under "Number to Fetch". Use the Preferences menu item to set the default values these button display.

The title shows you how many articles are unseen, and may include the minimum number of articles to retrieve in order to see all "unseen" articles. This happens when only some articles have been previously marked as seen in a range of articles.

Use the controls at the bottom of the dialog to choose what article range to retrieve. The numbers after "Articles available:" show you the range of articles available as reported by the server.

- Get Earliest n Available will retrieve articles starting from the first article available on the server.

- Get Latest n Available is the default value - and the articles will be retrived starting at latest server article going back to the number of articles you've selected.

- Start at Next Unseen (number) allows you to travel though a newsgroup getting a managable amount of articles at a time, continuing from the next unseen position each time.

- Get n Starting at Article# allows you to specify a starting point anywhere withing the range of available articles.

Note! It is important to limit the number of articles retrieved at one time because many articles can consume large amounts of memory. WinVN stores all of the article header data in memory. A good rule of thumb is to limit the number of articles retrieved to 1/1000 of the amount of memory in your computer. A 512MB PC can easily handle 500,000 articles. This is not a hard limit, just a guideline. A 3 Million articles will use more than 2GB of memory. 32bit systems should limit the number of articles to 2 Million or less at a time. 64bit systems with a large amount of RAM should be able to get many more.