Favorite Newsgroup client?

[Tim D]

I was using XNews before but got so fed up with memory and speed with very large amounts of headers. Then I had a brilliant idea of trying some opensource product (Gravity) that was more up-to-date only to realize it was even worse in those regards compared to Xnews which is worked on by only one guy. So is Forte or whatever the best in this regard or what? Or maybe I just have a bad habit of wanting to see as much as I can be given at once.

 

[averydonovan]

Gravity is pretty awful when it comes to speed and memory usage, but I use it still since it does the job the best still for me. I have also used Pan on Windows but it had issues with crashing a lot and was a bit more limited than Gravity. Agent is just a bit dated and doesn't seem as capable as readers like Xnews, Gravity, or Pan. Gravity just seems to get the job done the best for me and has fewer drawbacks compared to the other newsreaders for me. Btw, Gravity isn't open source. It was a commercial product but was discontinued a few years ago and one of the former developers is adding some features to it and keeping it up to date. IIRC, Xnews is no longer being worked on.

 

[Tim D]

I think its opensource now. Xnews did a good job handling large binaries. I was annoyed when Xnews would crawl when opening 2 large newsgroups, but Gravity is crawling with 1. In fact it is still trying to thread just 1 newsgroup. If I am looking to just mostly download binaries, how would you rate Gravity vs Xnews. I haven't even gotten to the point of doing this with Gravity yet so I suppose I need to take it slow and spoon feed it less headers at a time?

 

[Mr.Radar]

What about Mozilla Thunderbird? Though it's primarily an e-mail app it has newsgroup capabilities, and though I haven't use them extensively it seems pretty stable.

 

[null]

The only clients I like are the ones I don't have to pay for.

 

[funnytimes]

I use newsgroups ALOT, and I think I may have found a gem. I use powergrab (http://www.cosmicwolf.com/), while it may not be the most feature rich client, it uses very few system resources and is very quick with loading headers and things. I have Athlon XP 1800+, 1gb ram, and use seperate 8mb cache harddrives for the headers and downloaded files.



I've used xnews (I did not like the interface, was not exactly a download only client), grabit (good client but uses too many resources), newsleecher (produced many incompletes with my verizon usenet server back when they were making repairs). I will try newsleecher and newsbin pro in the future when I have time.

 

[Tim D]

Thanks for the tip.

I also found http://www.bnr2.org/ to try out as well.

 

[mustang]

http://www.newsbin.com/

edit: greetz to a fellow so'caler

 

[gloco]

I've tried quite a few and found them to be quite inferior to xnews, including newsbin which was hella confusing. yes, xnews does have a problem handling large ng's, i've been to ng's that have like 4-7 million parts and man does it totally crap out half way into them. I just limit the parts it can download to 3 1/2 million and it seems to work fine. Although, scrolling through those listings after it downloads them is another story.

Now, on the upside, Xnews does have that nifty real-time search engine so finding groups is as easy as 1-2-3.

By the way, if you're not getting great download speeds, try giganews. I pay $25/month for unlimited downloads and i get speeds anywhere between 400KB/sec to a full megabyte/sec which is insane (and the speeds split evenly when downloading more than from one group).