Carl,
I'll tell you why I perfer it. Basically with the new scheme, you are
less likely to run out of disk space because the space has been reserved
for you. What good is it when you import 5 megs worth of stuff, delete
most (not all) of the articles after you read it so you're basically back
down to a small news.dat file, and then reimport another 5 megs worth of
news article. Just keep it at or around 5 megs if that's what you're going
to use.
Lets say you have 6-8 megs on your HD.
The old way, if you expired some articles so that you are down from 5 megs
to 100k news.dat file and you decide to go into netscape that night
to download a 4-5 meg worth of software, then you download your news.zip file,
you'll run out of space! If you don't then you'll run out of space filtering
and/or unpacking these articles.
Gary