How to Improve Binary Boy Speed and Efficiency
Go to the Logging tab in the settings and make sure the logs are unchecked. This improves responsiveness significantly.
Go to the Newsgroups tab in the settings. Enable the Cache option. This minimizes the bandwidth usage.
If you don't mind losing the Date, From and size information, uncheck the "extended header" option on the same tab. However keep in mind that some servers (pro.binaryboy.com for example) require this to be enabled. If an error appears on the Log tab when attempting to download headers, enable this option again. This reduces both memory and bandwidth usage.
Go to the Search strings tab and enable "Apply search/filters during subject download" This will discard non-matching headers instead of holding the whole set in memory. This reduces memory usage. This works best with the cache enabled so you don't have to re-download the headers.
Make sure the Folders tab is blank. It is flat out inefficient and slow. Use the history file's Import command to do basically do the same thing much faster. This increases the speed/responsiveness.
Norton CrashGuard is known to cause Binary Boy to be slow. Try disabling it if you're running it.
If your anti-virues software has an option to scan every new file, try disabling it and instead schedule a scan of the entire drive occasionally. And of course never open executable files downloaded from an untrusted source.
An install of v1.94 on a clean system will set most of these options for maximum efficiency automatically. Upgrades preserve the settings of the previous version.