Abusenets, on the other hand, gives me a pretty steady 450kb/s or more. all the time. Start to finish of the download. And theres none of this uploading shit to worry about, either.
Enough of why I think you should use it though, this is about how to use it. I have put it into two parts, each with their own steps. Part one is setting the shit up, part two is actually using it.
Part 1 - Setting the shit up
1) Sign up with www.newzbin.com. This is a site that trawls through usenet finding stuff for you, and setting it all out in an easy to understand manner. You could, theoretically, do all this without it, but it would be a serious pain in the scrotum. Plus, although you do have to pay for a subscription, but it only costs £2 for a month, so its not a serious cost. Getting a newzbin account is pretty painless, and if you get stuck, theres a shitload of documentation, so just go read that.
2)Next stop is www.newsdemon.com. This provides your actual access to teh abusenets. When you finally get round to downloading stuff, these are the guys you download stuff from. They provide varous packages, most with download limits (ie, 30gig a month), but i personally prefer the unlimited package, as it still only works out to £10 a month, and I dont have to worry about running out of credit. There are other places you can get the same kind of service from, but I dont know if any of them are any good, as I havent used em. If anyone reading this has, let me know, and I will add them here. Again, setting this up is all pretty self explanitory, and shouldn't trouble you too much.
3)Once you have done all the above, and your orders have been processed and so on, you should have a username and password for both newzbin and newsdemon. Next you need the programs that deal with all this stuff. The first thing you need is NZB-o-Matic (or NZB-o-matic+, its pretty much the same). You can grab nzb-o-matic from here, or nomp from here. I'll cover how to get vanilla flavour working, as i never bothered with the plus kind (it needs .NET, I could never be arsed to get that on first). Basically, you unpack the contents of the rar to a folder. It has an executable in it. Run that. Theres your program!
4)Now to put the relevant details into nzb-o-matic. When the program opens, it has three tabs accross the top. The far left one is titled Usenet Servers. Make sure that is selected, and hit Add Server. On the pop-up, hit Use Login, then enter the log in details sent to you by newsdemon. In the Server field, enter uswest.newsdemon.com. Set Connections to 4, and leave the rest as is. Hit ok, and it should show up in your servers list. You now want to repeat the process for the uswest.newsdemon.com and europe.newsdemon.com servers. This means that if one of their servers is having a spack, it'll automagically make up for it with the other servers. Also worth noting is that sometimes the authentication of your account can take longer to get to some servers than others.
5)The next program you need is called quickPAR. This fancy little app does some kind of magic trick. Seriously. I dont quite understand how it works, its all full of maths. But basically, if you download something with usenet and theres a bit missing, quickPAR fixes this. Happily, it doesnt need all that much setting up.
6)Hurrah! you are now all set up for using teh abusenets. Part 2 will come a little later, as I have to go out now. WATCH THIS SPACE
OMFG, its Part 2 - Actually Using It
Right, when I left you last time, you had a couple of programs installed and set up, and accounts with the appropriate providers. Now what? I'l tell you now what...
1)First off, you need to find something to download. Head off to www.newzbin.com, and poke around there. Dont forget to sign in first, as although you can still browse what they have, you wont be able to download anything or read comments. This is important: *always* read the comments first. Generally, if there are no comments, it means nothing is wrong. If there are comments, it can be something like "the film works, but its too dark to really enjoy" or "this program doesnt include serial" or some such. Make sure you check out the comments, and you should be fine. Most of the time.
2)ok, so you have found something interesting looking. Now what? First off, make sure it has a little green tick. Nearly everything should have one, i dont remember seeing one that doesnt, but just check. Just means that all of the files are actually there, and nothing is missing.
3)next, click on the name of the thing you want. This brings you to a more detailed page about that post. The main interesting bit is the stuff at the top, where it says "Post Information". This has such handy info as the total size of the thing, the catagory (ie: DVD, ISO) and URL (which usually links you to the program/games review or homepage, or the imdb link if its a film). The comments are Riiiiiiiiight at the bottom, after the big confusing looking list of stuff. Make sure you check out the comments, ignore the list of stuff.
4)Sometimes it'll say "WARNING - incomplete files". What this means is that, actually, theres a couple of files missing off the post. Dont panic though, as long as there is most of it there, you can usually fix it (i'll get on to how in a bit). What you need to check though, is that the post includes PAR files. to check for this, you need to look at (insert dramatic music here) the Big Confusing Looking List of Stuff. Yes, the one I just told you to ignore. Hush, you. All you need to do is go down the list looking at the extensions. most of them will probably be .rar (unless you are looking at music, then it'll jut be the mp3 files, often.) What you are looking for is, somewhere in there, some files with the .PAR2 extension. If theres only one, maybe two dodgy rars (shown in red), and theres PAR2 files, its safe to grab.
5)So how exactly do you grab it? Look at the top of the Big List. Theres a button called "Get Message ID's". Click on that, and it'll make you what is called an nzb file, which should come up as a download prompt. What this basically is is a list of the usenet posts that you need to download to get the thing you are trying to download. You can just save it to disc, but what I would recommend is to assign nzb-o-matic to open it. You may have to manually browse to the nzb-o-matic executable to set this up, but in the long run it means a lot less fucking about.
6)if you have made nzb-o-matic grab it automagically, it should open the program and populate the Transfer Queue with the files you want. You can check this by clicking the Queue tab at the top. You should now have a big list of things to download, and a list of your servers at the bottom, all with "disconnected". So now what?
7)Hurrah! You guessed right! we need to connect (if you didnt guess right, go stand in the corner and beat yourself with branches till I tell you to stop). Easy to do, just go to the Servers tab and hit connect. You should see all your connections at the bottom change to Downloading. Dont worry if a couple of them fail to connect, I get that a lot. It wont actually affect your download speed, as it just means theres more room for your other connections.
8)Now step away from the interwebs and do something else. Seriously. On your average home interweb connection, abusenets take it over COMPLETELY! I often have msn and x-fire fall over because they cant connect any more. On the other hand, this happens because it is using every available inch of your internet-pipe for downloading your porn. Er....films. yes, films.
9)when thats all done, you should have an utter shitload of rar and PAR2 files in your download directory. Hooray! now what? Well, as you have quickpar set up (you do, dont you?), the next step is to just double click any of the PAR2 files. Doesnt matter which one, the program works out all the rest for you. Quickpar will open, and automagically check if anything needs repairing. If its all good, it'll say "repair not needed" under the progress bar. Say "hooray" and close the program. If it says "omfg, broken!" or similar, just click the repair button at the bottom right. If it says it hasnt enough to repair, you got a duff download, try and find what you want from a different post. Worth doing this with everything you download, as its bloody quick, and will tell you if something hasnt downloaded properly.
10)almost there! you now have a folde full of rar files, that have all been checked and found shiney. Just click on a rar file and extract the contents as you would any other rar file. NOTE: if its a really big download, its worth trying to find the first rar file in the archive, just to make sure you dont miss some small file somewhere.
11)Enjoy your illicitely gained electronic goods!
12)buy me a pint the next time you see me
Thanks for that, nice job. Certainly something I'm considering when I change ISP, although Prof mentions some issues with NTL were mentioned on their start page.
