how to d/l huge ass files off Usenet with News Shark
First off the good news is News Shark is freeware. The bad news is that it its actually what I call an adware meaning it send ads to your PC in a small horizontal strip on top of News Shark. Since this is extremly annoying to me I will tell you later how to stop that in 2 easy steps.
But why use News Shark then? Because it's vary easy (for me, anyway) to set up, configure and use. Second you won't have to decode/undecode the files you d/led to the proper format like Agent, and 3rd, it saves the place of the file, so you can stop it right in the middle of d/l a huge ass file and start it up 10 hours later and the file won't be corrupted. It doesn't overburden you with a lot of unnessesary functions like Free Agent does, its only goal is to d/l files and it does that wonderfully.
The easiest way to get a copy of NewsShark is to go to www.DownLoad.com and type the name into the search window.
Let's assume you have d/led News Shark already and now want to set it up:
1. Start up your Internet connection first. Then fire News Shark. The first thing News Shark will say is:
- Hi. I am sharky. Are you using AOL or MSN for news group access?
choose "No, let's move on" and press "Next"
- News server name: Put your news server provider. The port will always be 119
- Choose "My server requires identification" and fill in your user name and password, then click on "Save password". "Next"!
- click "Next" ag'in!
- choose the folder where you want to d/l your stuff
- choose "No" to d/l everything to the main folder
- "Next", "Next", "Next" and "Done"........8-)
- now fill in your fav Ng's names
- now go to "Options", go to "Download", and move the "Emergency restart wait as far as to the left as possible, and turn OFF the "Enable emergency restart" option
- now still in "Options", go to the "Scan" folder and move the "XOVER" to about 1180 headers at the time. this will speed up headers' d/ling proccess
- yer done settin' NewShark!
2. So now you have News Shark all ready to go and you can't wait to start using it. To do this press the Scan button and watch the headers come down.
News Shark has 3 main "folders" - Headers, Batch and Proccesed. Headers is where your headers for each NG will be. Batch is where the headers for the files you choose to d/l will be and Proccessed
is where the finished d/led files will be listed along with any error messages if any.
Let's go over each one in detail.
2.1 The Headers folder has Scan Stop buttons and Group Zoom. This is where the headers for your Ngs will be. the NG can be toggled from the option on the right side. To choose a header, click on it and press the "Add to batch" square button. You can choose more than one header with the mouse.
2.2 The Batch folder has DownLoad and Stop buttons. This is where all the stuff you have chosen to d/l will be.
2.3 The Proccessed has Clear All and Clean Selected. This is where the already d/led stuff will show up.
If for some reason you miss the set up message, you can just click on the Scan button and the set-up menu will pop in.
3. Oh, almost forgot: To stop those trully annoying ads News Shark sends your way do this:
make a 0 (zero) bites file called amc with NO EXTENTIONS -that's important - and place that file inside C:\Windows. That's all, you are done. You can use Notepad to do this. The stupid advert.dll (you can find it inside C:\Windows\System\) which is responsible for the ads will be trying to create that same folder with the same name
inside C:\Windows, but won't be able to, he-he. NOTE: do NOT try to mess with advert.dll, that file is needed for News Shark to run.
a few known News Shark quirks:
News Shark uses the C:\Windows\Temp folder to keep data on its incomplete d/ls. If you stop in the middle of a d/l and decide to clean your PC, make sure you do not remove the df-something file from there. That's actually News Shark's uncomplete data that it will need later on.
With News Shark is you gotto manually save the headers once in a while while d/ling 'cuz News Shark doesn't do that on its own; so in case of sudden hung ups if it is shut down and restarted, it won't rememeber which file it was d/ling last and will start d/ling from the top file all over again. To save the headers manually, click on the little yellow arrow icon thats right bellow the book icon that is on the right of the huge Options button in the top left corner of News Shark-
. Sometimes NewShark can get confused and give you an error message while starting up. The only thing to do then is to uninstall the program, reboot, then install it again. What can you do, it's free after all, right?
Happy d/lin'!!