You might notice that the total value in the progressbar on getting news counts down. This can be of various reasons, but the most normal reason is that an article is not available anymore on the newsserver due to cancellation. Another reason can be a short expire of articles on the server so that you do not have time to collect it before it's being deleted. When ConnectThor or SendTCP gives you an error message like this, that means that your ISP has a full harddisk on their news server. A good idea then is to mail or phone them, or just to wait till the next day and hope that they have fixed it.
All error messages starting with a number is from the mail or news server.
If you notice a big difference in the speed, this is probably caused by DMA contention. Overscan can cause this, along with a high number of colours on the screen.