Newsgroups...
Newsgroups, (also known as usenet - USEr NETwork) have been around since the dawn of the internet itself. The newsgroups were then know as bulletin or discussion boards and it was a way in which groups of people could communnicate between themselves by leaving messages on the boards for each other, and others to reply to them. Newsgroups today contain many many topics of interest on just about anything and everything you need to know. .
How they Work
Imagine the newsgroups as an array of notice boards at a large company, each individual notice board can contain many messages which stay up a certain amount of time before they expire. Once they expire then they are removed and more are added to the boards. The newsgroups work in a simular way. The newsgroups themselves consist of many individual groups which you can subscribe to. (ie, one company has many notice boards - the usenet contains many groups) Each group usually contain either plain messages (text groups) or files that are downloadable (binary groups). The amount of time that messages or binariy files stay online is called the retention time, the retention time varies from the actual news server that you subscibe to.
Accessing the newsgroups
In order to access the newsroups you must have access to a news server. Most UK ISP include free a subsciption to the newsgroups, but beware, usually this is restriced in a couple of ways. 1) The amount of groups you an access. 2) The retention time. 3) bandwidth limiting (also known as capping). Some ISP have as little as a week in retention rate and others do not support binary groups.
The best way to access the newsgroups is by paying a monthly subsciption to a dedicate news server, or as it is known, an NNTP server (Network News Transfer Protocol ). All news servers access the the same usenet network. There are many providers which you can subscribe to, most of which offer different option plans. Most plans are arranged by monthly useage plan, ie; one plan may offer a low tier 2gb downloads per month, another high option plan may offer 50gb downloads per month. Plans vary from provider to provider and may have various strings attached. One thing to watch for is the retention rate. A good average retention rate is 60 days, some of the top newsgroup providers such as giganews offer up to 120 days while other newsgroups providers can offer as low as 15 days. Another thing to watch for for is the download rate, Most providers allow you to run at the maximum speed of your connection but some do still cap the limit.
Software
Once you have subscribed to a server then you will need software to actually access the newsgroups, known as a newsreader. Most software is for newsgroups is licenced (paid) although there are a couple of free newsreaders available such as xnews. I myself tend to find that the paid software option is the better option, most of the latest latest newsreaders are pretty easy to set up too. Once you have the software in place then a simple confuration is needed, usually this involves nothing more that the NNTP address and your username and password.
Retreiving the newsgroups
Once you have the software configured then you can finally connect to the NNTP servers. Once you connect for the first time you will need to fetch a groups-list, this will enable you to pick which individual groups you wish to subscribe to. Once you have chosen which groups you want to view then you will then next need to download the headers for that group, think of headers as a heading, or a title for each message on the notice board, but in this case it is a a title for each message inside the groups. Once you have downloaded the headers for the group you can then click and view messages within the newsgoup.
nntp server recommendations
If you are going to be a heavy user of the newsgroups then you will want a good connection rate (download speed) and also retention rate so you can look back at other articles you may have missed in other groups. For this I would recommend a provider such as giganews which have unlimited speed and various useage based accounts ranging from 2gb per month to unlimimted. The retention rate for giganews is around 120 days for binary groups
If you are wanting just average access to the groups then you may want to consider using Astraweb. Astraweb have what are known as block accounts, this means you purchase a certain amount of bandwith but you are not limited to the time period that you use it in, even if it takes you 4 months to use, then, you simply purchase more once you have run out. The download speed is not limited in any way for block accounts and the retention rate is an average 68 days, which is ideal for the average user.
Newsreaders recommendations
A free newsreader which you may want to try is xnews, xnews is an old newsreader but it is still a good reader and it is completely free to use without any restrictions. The only downfall I find to xnews is that it becomes unstable in large groups containing headed of over 1,000,000. My personal favorite newsreader is one called newsleecher. This is available on a yearly licience for $19.99 or $29.99 (10 or 15 GBP) depending on if you have the supersearch facility enabled or not. They also have a new pricing plan where you can pay a monthly subscription without any minimum contract time and this includes the supersearch facility for $2.99 (around 1.50) a month which is ideal if you are unsure about paying for a full year licence.