I remember one of my mates used to use this method for downloading stuff, as I recall he said it was fast due to you connecting via a server. Does anyone use this method? or can you enlighten me as google is pants :thumbdwn:

Cheers

A rough guide to alt.binaries A while since I used it

You need to get a news reader - Forte Agent is quite a good one and there is a free version. Then you connect to your isps news server...something like news.wanadoo.co.uk and it will download all the news group names, there will be thousands.

The next step is to search for the type of thing you want to download...not sure what you are after but the newsgroup will be something like alt.binaries.warez.

And then download all the message headers, these are quite small but might take quite a while to fetch. Downloads tend to be split into small bits (normally about 0.5Mb) using WinRAR, over a large number of messages and will have extensions like .r00, .r01, .r02 etc. You will need to mark all the parts you require and then download them from the server - you then save all the attachments to a folder and open the first part of the archive with winRAR and it will reassemble all the bits ready for extraction.

I'm sure there are variations on this but that is the gist of it...may be better off with P2P software.

Cheers matey!!!!

This downloading marlarkey can get a smidge complex I think bittorrent is winning at the 'mo as i've had no probs so far!!!!! Gonna give Winmx a bash aswell see how that goes too.

Make sure your Anti-Virus is bang up-to-date.

Trust me, you'll need it

Yup always updating!!!!!! I had that fiasco with Kazzaa was not happy i'll tell you

What fiasco with kazaa?

Got a virus that totally knacked my system and a rebuild was needed!!!! Was not a happy bunny i'll tell you!!!! That was a good while ago though, so I learnt my lesson the hard way.

Ouch!

Will investigate the alt.binaries route too. After some eluding packed files

One of the best sources of stuff though is IRC - but it's all a bit black magic.

Lot's of command line stuff, tortuous commands, turning your computer to face south and doing a bit of yoof speak. The upshot is though that you d/l from a single user and generally very high speed.

Worth the work if you are after something a bit specialist Otherwise P2P is much less bother.

I thought with .binaries you downloaded from a server??? So you get full bandwith useage for a download i.e damn fast!!!!!! This is what I was lead to believe??????

I reccommend suprnova or lokitorrents for well torrents hehe I've been downloading off dial up (still waiting for broadband stuff to show :( ) and it's not too harsh!!! The beauty and quite bizzare thing is the more you share the better the download speed you get!!!!

Use torrentbits for the very latest releases and buld up a good ratio and you get excellent speeds, Iget as fast as I used to on FTPs