I'm not sure what little green book you're refering to. The PICBasic pro program is installed in the school computers, thus there is no manual to look at. I've gone online and looked up the manual so I'm assuming that's what you're refering to. I'm a circuits electrical engineer and thus have never worked with programming or microcontrollers, no classes were ever offered so I'm just learning this simply for my senior design. Keep in mind I'm taking 16 other hours, have a part time job am on two sports teams, and am in multiple organizations on campous so I don't have oodles and oodles of time to devote to reading resources on the subject that I have to look up raondomly on the internet. For senior design they allow your groups to choose a project and run with it, they won't hold your hand anymore so I'm just trying to use the resources out there for help. I know I don't know much about these topics and I've read the PICBasic manual I found online and I've looked through the datasheet, but honestly since I've never had any help or classes on any of this stuff most of what they talk about is beyond me without me spending more time to research the research. Hopefully that helps a bit with where I'm coming from, also despite the preceeding ranting I'm extremly thankfull for the help I've recieved so far on this forum, I know you're using your time to help someone that you don't even know so thank you. I know we're not using RS232 to communicate by the way. So the 16F88 doesn't have it's own internal oscilating crystal. Is there any way to get around creating an external oscilating circuit or is that a must? Also I know PAUSE 10 doesn't pause for ten seconds, I just thought you might need a breif pause between sending the first hexadecimal command to the LCD and the second. Can I just send one right after the other with no break?