Sarasota PC Monitor

Practicing the Black Art (08/02)

Windows XP Newsgroups

by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@comcast.net
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.

A newsgroup is an electronic bulletin board where people with a common interest can exchange information, ideas, suggestions or simply rant and rave. Microsoft has established newsgroups for XP customers to collaborate with others who have XP installed on their computers. If you think you might benefit from this kind of interaction among your peers, here's how to get started and find out what others who use XP are doing and thinking.

You need either a newsgroup reader such as Outlook Express which comes with Windows XP or you can access newsgroups directly from the Web. We're going to set up access to the newsgroups with Outlook Express in this example.

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Figure 1
  1. Launch Outlook Express either from the Startup menu or the icon on your desktop.
  2. From the Tools menu in Outlook Express, click Accounts.
  3. In the Internet Account dialog box, click the Add button, and then click News. (Figure 1.)
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Figure 2

4. The Internet Connection Wizard appears. Whatever you type in the Display Name: box is what others will see if you post a message to a newsgroup or reply to one. Type whatever you like. (Figure 2.)

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Figure 3

5. Click Next.

6. Your email address goes in this dialog box. You can't leave this blank. (Figure 3.)

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Figure 4

7. Here is where you type the Internet News Server Name provided by Microsoft. Type in msnews.microsoft.com. It doesn't matter if you type upper or lower case, just spell it correctly. (Figure 4.)

8. Click Next. Click Finish, and then click Close.

9. Another dialog box will appear and ask "Would you like to download newsgroups from the news server you added?" Click Yes.

10. Don't be intimidated by the number of newsgroups that appear. You are interested only in the ones that pertain to Windows XP. In the Newsgroup Subscriptions dialog box, type microsoft.public.windows.xp. That will display only the newsgroups dedicated to some feature of Windows XP. Click the one(s) you are interested in and click Subscribe.

11. Click OK to close the dialog box and you're finished.

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Figure 5

To read and respond to messages displayed, open Outlook Express and locate the newsgroup in the Folder list frame. Click on the folder, and start enjoying your new subscription. :

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Copyright 2002. This article is from the August 2002 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/

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