So you’ve heard of Usenet downloading, but don’t know how to start? Here’s your quick start guide.
What is the Usenet?
The Usenet is the largest and oldest online discussion forum and also hosts the largest collection of movies, games, music and much more. If you can imagine it chances are it will be on Usenet.
The huge advantages of Usenet downloads include extremely high speeds (up to 100 MBit) from the moment you start downloading and maximum anonymity, since you download from a server and not from other users as with torrents.
The Usenet is composed of tens of thousands of servers, which all exchange the discussions and files uploaded to them between each other. So in fact it is a gigantic network which can be accessed from everywhere in the world.
How To Get Started
Getting access is extremely easy, and so is the entire downloading process. All you need is the following:
1. Get yourself a good client. This is the software you’ll use to search and download files.
There are a lot of great programs available for free that make downloading a breeze – just check out our section “The Best Clients”.
2. Choose a Usenet provider which offers fast, cheap and reliable service.
Often your ISP does provide you with Usenet access. However, most of the time it will be mediocre or even completely inusable for downloading due to poor speeds, insuficient retention, or they plainly deleted all files leaving only the discussion groups intact.
Unlimited access to the Usenet is extremely cheap. But out of the hundreds of providers out there it is hard too choose the right one.
Let us help you – Just go to the “How to choose a Usenet provider” section and learn what you have to know and what differences there are between the services available. Or just go to the main page and look which provider did best in our tests!
3. Use a Usenet search engine to find the files you want.
Indexing services like Newzleech.com or BinSearch.info offer exactly that and are very easy to use. Also, they are completely free!
A note: You’ll come across some unfamiliar terms. While it’s not strictly necessary it might be a good idea to learn what they mean. You can find an article on the most common terms here.
What is an NZB file?
An NZB file is something like a torrent for your BitTorrent client – It tells your Usenet client exactly which files to download, making downloading extremely easy. It was invented by the creators of the site NewzBin.com. Just go to an indexing site like Newzleech.com or BinSearch.info, select the file you want to download and everything will be downloaded automatically.
Anything else I should know?
Be sure to use an antivirus, especially when downloading programs. Never open an .exe file, especially not if it was labeled as “keygen” or something like that. Also, always check if the size of the file is equivalent to what it should be. For example, when you look for a game it will surely not be just 186 KBytes, right? We recommend to use the Advanced search feature “min. Size” which you can find on Newzleech.com to only get the best search results.
And that’s about it!
Start right now, go through the list provided above and become part of the Usenet community
