NewsPro for Windows

User Reviews

• Good-But!

  Clive_February 10, 2005

  Pros

  Seems solid enough & works well once you get to grips with it.

  Cons

  I found the intructions very confusing. It took me 30 mins just to find out how to download the newsgroups from my own ISP. More for the advanced user I would think.

  Summary

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• Nothing has more features!

  December 16, 2004

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This program is great. I've been using it for a very long time, and it's gotten better and better with each version. The author listens to user comments and incorporates ideas and bug fixes promptly. It does everything you need a newsreader to do for Usenet: text reading/replying, binary downloading/uploading, auto downloads, scheduling, server priorities, and a lot more! Give it a try and you won't be sorry.

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• Functional and well-engineered

  *** power user ***November 24, 2004

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  To get a sense of how arbitrary and ridiculous the CNET/download.com reviews are, compare their reviews for Xnews and NewsPro. NewsPro's user-interface is probably a little daunting at first, especially to novice users, but it's logical and easy to figure out. It also facilitates some fancy and useful functionality that lets you: maximize available connections to the news server to speed downloads; and prioritize messages for download in elegant ways. The developers have engineered the multi-tasking/multi-threading features well. The price is a little high for a newsreader, but at least you're buying a well-crafted tool. Of course, CNET rates it only a 4 out of 5. Xnews gets a 5 rating, the highest possible, and it has one of the most confusing and poorly designed user-interfaces I've ever seen in a newsreader, even for someone who's familiar with the genre. Functionally, it's fairly complete, but it's very easy to open too many connections to a news server, while not utilizing available connections (usually 2) effectively, slowing downloads. It crashes fairly often, makes you wait during lengthy operations, even halting the mouse cursor and preventing access to other running programs. After using it for a few weeks, it started to have problems decoding binaries properly on many messages, displaying them as gobbledygook text. As freeware, Xnews is worth every penny you pay for it.

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