Review of NetNews Offline Volume 1

by: Pauli Porkka


CD Title: Net News Vol 1 Review: Net News Vol 1 (By Jason Compton)
NetNews Offline Vol 1 contains about 3 months of news (articles) from the following Usenet and other newsgrups: Overall newsgroups mentioned above contains over 226.000 articles! As you can see it is specifically aimed at Amiga people. For you out there who don't have the ability/resources to keep up with those newsgroups this is a must.

Last messages in the compilation are dated 31 December 1995 so I guess new volume 2 is about to come containing the news for the past 3 months from the beginning of 1996.

CD contains the GRn reader for the articles. It states in the back leaflet that installation requires 30 MB of harddisk space and 2 MB memory to run. Actually installation took only 12 MB but I guess it may grow somewhat during the use but I doubt that it takes the 30 MB mentioned in the CD though. Installation itself was a breeze with the help of the standard installer program. I had to copy the GRn to my hard disk from the CD since I had to change a few tooltypes to change the default hires-interlaced screenmode to Super-Hires Laced I am always using and somehow my promotion utility didn't do it automatically as it was supposed to. For that reason I'd have liked to see the reader copied also.

The GRn does its work pretty fluently although starting it takes several minutes while it scans the article index for unread/read articles. I guess the version of GRn is good enough for the job except it didn't have any kind of search option that I could find. It is a real pain to try to seek something from thousands of messages without automatic search. Otherwise reading is fast enough and mostly depends on your CD drive's speed. There was no documentation following the GRn, not that it especially had needed one but it would have been nice to have atleast something. The CDROMs cover leaflet contained some explanations but it was all in German, so not much help to us non German.

To summarize it, for the people without access to these newsgroups it is a definite must although the articles are almost half a year old. For the prgrammers and others trying to find a solution to specific problem this is life saver and saves you from asking the same questions all over again.


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