How to Download from Newsgroups with the Free Xnews Newsreader.

Xnews

This is a free, very simple to use newsreader. It lacks some important functions (most importantly, it can't handle NZB files) but it is probably the best way to start out in newsgroups if you don’t want to spend a lot of cash and a lot of hours figuring out how things work.

Xnews needs no installation and is easy to configure. Download here: download.cnet.com/Xnews/

If you want to use newsgroups through NZB files, try this site- How to use Usene t

How to Use Newsgroups with the Xnews Newsreader

Step by step instructions for beginners

Xnews comes as a zip.

Unzip to a new folder
Click the icon of the application file.
A dialogue box pops up asking for the name of the server. Whatever news provider you signed up for will usually have several news servers in different locations or maybe for different kinds of files. Chose one of the addresses and copy and paste it into the dialogue box. It will now ask you to give the server a nickname which can be anything you like.
Once you have done this the main menu appears. There are spaces here for your news provider user name and password. Fill these in and you are ready to go. There are other options to configure, if you want to but they aren’t necessary to start browsing the Newsgroups.
As soon as you hit OK at the bottom of the screen, Xnews will contact the server and start to download the names of the Newsgroups available. There are a lot of newsgroups (tens of thousands) so this takes a few minutes.
Once you have the full list, you can see the number of postings in each group. Of the tens of thousands of groups only a few thousand are popular and have anything worth checking out.
·It is worth hitting the ‘total’ column so that the newsgroups are in order of the number of postings they have. This will save opening a lot of empty groups or groups that are just full of spam.

You can start exploring now by clicking on any group- Xnews will download the 'headers' for the group. The 'headers' are descriptions of the posts. A post might contain text, photos, software or movie files.

How to Search Newsgroups

If you want something in particular you can download all the headers of the group most likely to have a relevent posting, then use the Xnews newsgroup reader search facility to search the group. The drawback here, is that large groups have ten of thousands of posts and maybe hundreds of thousands of headers, so this can take a long time.

Sometimes, it is easier to run a web based newsgroup search. Newzleech.com and binsearch both cataloque newsgroups postings and allow free searchs.

The search results will tell you which group to look in and when the post was made. This makes it easier to find the post with Xnews,

Xnews allow you to download all the headers of a group or just some of the headers. Right click on the Newsgroup name and chose ‘open special’ for this option. A box appears with sliders. You set the sliders to select a part of the group’s headers to download. You can find any post detailed in newzleech pretty quickly after a bit of trial and error.

Xnews. A few of the ten of thousands of newsgroups.

How to Download From Newsgroups with the Xnews Newsgroup Reader: A Guide for Complete Beginners

How to View Images

Xnews has a built in image viewer and will allow you to view any photos posted in one piece. Just click on the file and it will come up. (Toggle ‘view’ if you can’t see it).

Large photo files are never posted in one piece- they are split up and posted in separate pieces.

If the photos are in two or more pieces you will need to download them to a folder. The pieces will be automatically reassembled and you can see them with any picture viewer like ACDC, IrfanView (a free viewer, see links below) or the Windows viewer.

How to Download Multimedia Files From Newsgroups

To do this you need to understand a bit about how posting is done in newsgroups. Very large files are split up by the poster using software like masterspltter or WinRAR. You need to download all the files and then reassemble them.

WinRAR is the most common way to post large files like movies or games, as it compresses the data as well as splitting it into easy to manage pieces. WinRAR files are easy to recognise as the header always contains 'rar' somewhere.

WinRAR files ready for download. Click to view,

Other Split Files

Files split with mastersplitter are labelled 01 02 03 04 etc. To reassemble the files you need to install mastersplitter (free download below). Then click on the 01 file and masterplitter will join the pieces.

QuickPAR and PAR files

PAR files are usually made by a poster as an insurance against data corruption. If you have any trouble assembling the pieces of a post look for the PAR files. Once you have installed QuickPAR (free download below) click any PAR file and the program will repair the damage.

After this you simply need to open the post. If movies won't play, update your codecs or try the free open source media player, VLC. VLC will play almost any multimedia file, including incomplete AVI's.

Why the lightweight Xnews newsreader is still useful if you get Forte Agent or any other Heavyweight News Client

The chances are that if you use newsgroups a lot, you will want more functions and options from your newsreader. Forte Agent is good choice, as is Grabit.

Xnews still offers some useful features though.

The main advantage of Xnews is that it doesn't need installing, so it is completely portable. You can go into any Internet cafe in the world, download it and use. This is a big plus for travellers.
Xnews puts nothing on your computer that you don't tell it to. So, there are no huge, hard-to-find files burdening your PCs hard drive, This is good for any device with a limited memory. It is also good if you are using a public computer- many businesses and colleges really don't like newsgroup material on their computers.

Copyright and Warez

A lot of material on newsgroups is not legal for a variety of reasons so you need to exercise your judgement and be aware of the laws in your country. Downloading warez also opens you to viruses and agents of all kinds.