Natural Science Forum / Physics / Acoustics / August 2007

Hmm ... I am using Netscape Commicator 4.7, works fine for me. I have
also tried the last version of it, ie. version 7, it also seems to work
fine, but the box I installed in on blew its mobo and remains unfixed.

Generally speaking high speed internet access and "always on" requires a
hardware firewall. I strongly recommend the 3com 3c858 as in my
professional opinion being the most bang for the buck for home users.

Outlook Express with the third party add-on Outlook Quotefix is also
quite nice, I just like the classic netscape layout better, fortunatel
that skin remains a part of version 7.

Not all is appropiate for newsgroup discussion, you are most welcome to
mail me at plarsen@mail.tele.dk, I may or may not be able to assist with
setup choices, you are so extremely helpful here that I gladly will
assist pro bono.

  Kind regards

  Peter Larsen

Have you tried any of the dedicated purpose news reader software? I've
been haunting the newsgroups for over 15 years and very early on I
found that the mail programs such as OE, Netscape, etc., that the
newsgroup reading implementations in them is just an add-on
(especially with OE) and they do a poor job. Forget binaries with OE
because it just doesn't work without using a bunch of third party
add-ons. Forte Agent  http://forteinc.com  does email very well, but
Agent really shines when comparing the level of security and
flexibility of the program when reading either text or binary groups.

Note: I am NOT pushing/selling/hawking Forte Agent. There are several
good News Readers out there that are better than what Micro$oft or
Mozilla provides. I used Agent as an example because it works so well
for both text and binaries, it's reasonably priced, you get a 30 day
free try before you buy, they have been in business since 1994 and
their tech support is excellent compared to Micro$oft.

Yes, there is a learning curve. If you're a total newbie to software
other than what Micro$oft dumps into Window$, you will need to do a
little reading of instructions and following directions to set it up.
It's no more difficult than installing one of the new network enabled
multi-player shoot 'em up video games. An hour or so of your time will
be well rewarded by a fast, efficient news reader that doesn't have
all the built in security flaws Micro$oft is famous for.

You can google for "news reader" or "nntp reader" and find lots of
dedicated news reader packages. This page
http://usenetserver.com/download.html#PC  has links to many of the
available news readers. Some are totally free, others are very
modestly priced. They have nice descriptions of what each news reader
is best at, some are better for binaries, some are better for text
only, and they have simplified instructions for installing each news
reader.

I use Usenetserver.com for my news provider. It's less than $14 a
month, unlimited uploads and downloads (I average >20 Gigabytes a
month in binary downloads) excellent completion and retention of
messages. They currently host over 68,000 news groups. I regularly get
6 megabits/second transfer rates downloading from Usenetserver.com.
(my cable modem is capped at 6 megabits/second.)  If you're interested
in just the text-only newsgroups, Usenetserver has free access to the
text only groups.

Good luck and happy usenet surfing.

user@lost.in.the.net
(reply in group. address is spam trap.)