I need to know how i can possibly open non text files (such as 'exe', 'doc', 'jpg', etc...) into a string with vb. The only way i was able to do it was using 'input' one character at a time, but i do not have 17 hours to let this program run. is there a way that i can just grab the entire file (or at least large chunks of it) and dump it into a string?