A good definition of usenet can be found at Wikipedia. This is quick, so there is no wasting time on explanations. I will be showing you how to download by taking advantage of Usenet. What is available for download? Everything you can find on BitTorrent. Everything is first released on newsgroups before it hits the BT scene, so you will be the first. It’s not free and ISPs have recently withdrawn all free Usenet services as well. However, you download as fast as your maximum connection speed, it’s cheap, and fully anonymous (depending on your Usenet provider). This guide displays my way of downloading, but there are many other ways as well. Ensure that downloading is legal in your country.

What you’ll need:
A Usenet Service
A Usenet Client
RAR Extractor
Parchive Tool

Usenet Service
You will need to find a Usenet service provider appropriate for your needs. There are two types of pricing plans. Unlimited downloads for a monthly fee or pay by download (block accounts). With unlimited downloads, there are extra features and restrictions to look out for. Some cap speed and limit the number of connections. For the user who is an infrequent downloader, pay by download is the best option. There are many available, so do some comparison shopping online. Read the Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy; those are important.

I use Astraweb’s pay by download plan. They are improving quickly. I remember that they used to have low retention rates, but they continue to increase it. Downloading headers is free. Pricing is also superb.

Retention is the amount of time that an article (or download) will be available until it is cleared off the server. E.g., you have a Usenet service that offers 50 days of retention and someone posts a game called Puissance today. You will have 50 days to download it or it will be wiped off the server. Therefore, the higher the retention rate, the better.

Usenet Client
You will need an application program to download news articles. Find one that can import .nzb files because that will be useful and mandatory for our purposes. Some are easy to use, but some have a higher learning curve.

I use GrabIt because it’s free, simple, and good for downloading. It’s not good for actually reading news though.

Download GrabIt and install it. To the left, right click on MyGrabIt and select Add Server. Configure it:
Profile name: Whatever you like
Hostname: news.astraweb.com (For Astraweb or type in your provider’s Usenet server)
Port: 119 (That is the default port)
Account name: Your account name
Password: Your password

Leave the others at default or change them as you wish. You might want to increase the maximum number of connections to take advantage of higher speeds. You’ll probably get about 50-150 KB/s for every connection depending your provider and time of day. I set mine to 8-12 depending on the situation, so you can adjust them whenever. Now your profile should be listed. Right-click on it and select Full Update Groups to propagate the groups list. In that list you can Subscribe to groups you like. Downloads are always in alt.binaries newsgroups, but with this method, it requires that you download headers for each group to see what is available for download. Since we don’t want to do that, we will use NZB files. There is one downside to GrabIt. You can’t pause certain files or have PAR files paused automatically. You will need to setup a “dummy” server for that. What I do is create a new server with a non-existent news server and set my PAR files to download with the dummy server and it’ll just time out. When you need those files, you can right-click and switch back to your Usenet Service Provider.

Usenet Binaries Search Engine
There are a few search engines out there. They are:
NewzLeech
Binsearch
NewzBin

When I first learned about Usenet, I was going to NewzBin to look for posts, then I would download all the headers in that newsgroup and manually find and select the articles. With NZB, no more of that is required. I prefer to use NewzLeech now. Go to http://www.newzleech.com and search for something you want. It will show you a list of things and it looks confusing, but it’s not. Check the size to make sure that it’s appropriate. TV shows are either 40 minutes or 20 minutes, which is approximately 350MB or 230MB respectively. Games are 700MB per CD or 4.7GB per DVD. Applications vary, but for CD images, it will be similar to games. Click on it and select the files you want. Generally, NewzLeech does a good job at including all relevant files. Selecting all should be fine and click on Get NZB. Open it with GrabIt and it will download. You will see PAR files (used for recovery in case of corruption or incomplete uploads) in the list, if you don’t want those, right-click on those files and choose to download with a dummy server or don’t select it when getting the NZB. Once complete, you can click on Download folder at the top to open your folder.

Extracting RAR Files
7-Zip is good for extracting RAR files. Download and install that or use your favourite extractor. Double-click on the first RAR file and extract it to a location of your choice. Now you’re done. You can delete those files as they are unnecessary.

Parchive
If there are incomplete blocks or files, you will need to use a parchive tool. You can download and install QuickPar to check for file consistency. By double-clicking on the PAR2 file, QuickPar will check to see if any files need repairs. If it requires repairs, you might need to download more PAR files (that were set to download with dummy server previously). After getting the PAR files, run QuickPar again and click on Repair. Once done, simply extract it. If no repairs are required, close GrabIt and don’t save the batch to clear out those unnecessary PAR files.

And there you have it. Usenet does take time to learn, but as you become familiar with it, you will notice how useful it is. You can also use it for reading news and for posting in newsgroups of your liking. I know that this is not a fully complete guide, but if you have questions, just leave a comment. Thanks for reading!

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 12:22 pm, and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.