Newsreaders

If you have a Windows based computer you already have a pretty good newsreader.  Outlook Express is great for reading and posting to the non-binary groups.  Netscape and Opera also include a basic newsreader as part of their mail package.

There are also a variety of dedicated newsreaders, both freeware and commercial.  XNews is a very good freeware package.  Forte' provides both free and paid versions of it's Agent software.

Dedicated newsreaders make it much simpler to deal with multi-part binary files.  Here at RA I find the combination of using Outlook Express for reading text posts and Xnews for downloading binary posts works well for me.

Xnews is much better at presenting binary files to you for downloading, while reading the text posts with OE is not much different from reading my personal mail.

Next: Avoid the Spammers

Or, jump straight to setting up a new Usenet account with Outlook Express