NewsLeecher - Interface & Configuration
Binaries4all QuickJumpExplanation of the User Interface
NewsLeecher’s main screen is shown below. Before we go on to the settings, I will first explain the various parts of the interface.
At the top you can see the menu bar including a list to activate a group. The bar beneath it contains a number of buttons that perform the most common actions. Beneath all this we see the most important part of NewsLeecher, a bar in which we can choose between various tabs. The content of the main screen depends on the tab selected.
A brief explanation of the tabs: |
Add servers and Usenet newsgroups |
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Watch the contents of a Usenet newsgroup |
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List all items in the download queue |
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About the same as the Windows Explorer |
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Version information, news and a log |
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NewsLeecher’s SuperSearch |
Look at the bottom left-hand corner. The green section shows us the download speed in graph format. The section at the bottom right-hand corner is used to show the connections to the servers and which action is being performed on a server. Below this there is a status bar, which shows the maximum download speed, the current download speed and the free disk space.
All right, let’s start configuring NewsLeecher. Just click on Options at the right of the menu bar at the top of your screen.
Configuration
As you can see, the Options Dialog appears. NewsLeecher has a very extensive range of settings, so in this tutorial I will discuss only the most important ones. If you hover your cursor over an item, a tool tip with information about that item will appear. Note: I have only made screenshots of the right-hand side of the screen because the left-hand side always stays the same.
Let’s start with Advanced. I turned on Automatic Data Backups to save the download queue every minute, so it won’t be lost if my computer or the program crashes. You might want to turn on Auto connect on start-up to have NewsLeecher connect automatically when the program starts. The remaining options aren't of interest to us at the moment, but do feel free to try them. More information about each item can be found by holding the mouse on that item for two seconds in NewsLeecher.
We will skip a number of items and head directly to Connection. Turning on Never auto logoff will prevent NewsLeecher from disconnecting the server automatically.
At Download we enter the name of the default download folder. Files will be downloaded to this folder. If Put downloads into groupfolders is checked, every post will be placed in a separate folder, depending on the Usenet newsgroup you download from. For example, if you download something from alt.binaries.freeware the files will be placed in D:\download\alt.binaries.freeware.
Because I can’t remember from which group I downloaded a post a couple of days have passed, I left this option unmarked so I can create my own folders when downloading. This will be explained later in the tutorial. It is advisable to check 'Error check downloaded articles'.
The next tab is Group Caching. The default entry for Days to keep is 7, which will do for most servers. However, if one of your servers has a longer retention period, you might want to enter a higher number (just as I did). The settings for Cache Garbage Cleaning determines how often NewsLeecher is going to clean its cache.
At the Headers tab we activate No Limit because we always want to download all headers.
At the NZB Files tab we find some interesting settings concerning NZB files. Note: if you don’t know what NZB files are exactly, you can look at the NZB tutorial.
Associate with NewsLeecher associates NZB files with NewsLeecher, so when you click on an NZB file in Windows it will be directly imported into NewsLeecher. Furthermore, there are some settings for having NZB files downloaded to subfolders and to auto import NZB files that are placed in a specified folder. How to use NZB files with NewsLeecher will be explained later on in this tutorial.
We continue with the PAR2 Files tab. PAR2 files are used to repair downloaded incomplete files. (Click here for the QuickPar tutorial)
I have marked all of the options, which will result in PAR2 files automatically being paused when imported. We don’t actually want all PAR2 files to be downloaded because we might not need them at all. With these settings only the first PAR2 file will be downloaded, so we can check the RAR files and find out how many blocks we need.
My settings at the General tab are shown below:
Last but not least, the Interface tab. I checked Always minimize to system tray because I want NewsLeecher to minimize when I am downloading. NewsLeecher is only shown as an icon next to the system clock; this saves us some space in the taskbar.
These were the most important settings for NewsLeecher and the program is now ready to be used. Next we have to add servers and Usenet newsgroups to NewsLeecher.
To the next chapter: Adding servers and Usenet newsgroups
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