Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows XP in 24 Hours

By Greg Perry

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Author
  • Acknowledgments
  • Tell Us What You Think!
  • Introduction
  • Part I: Wake Up with Windows XP
  • Hour 1. Taking a Bird's-Eye Look at Windows XP
  • Hour 2. Getting Started with Windows XP
  • Hour 3. Managing the Windows XP Interface
  • Part II: Morning Windows Desktop Exploration
  • Hour 4. Working with the My Computer Window
  • Hour 5. Navigating Files with Windows Explorer
  • Hour 6. Calling for Help
  • Hour 7. Improving Your Windows Desktop Experience
  • Part III: Early Afternoon Windows Exploration
  • Hour 8. Installing Programs with Windows XP
  • Hour 9. Finding Files, Folders, and Friends
  • Hour 10. Using the Desktop Accessories
  • Part IV: Late Afternoon Internet Integration
  • Hour 11. Surfing the Web with Internet Explorer
  • Hour 12. Tying Windows into the Web
  • Hour 13. Networking with Windows XP
  • Hour 14. Managing E-mail and Newsgroups with Outlook Express
    • The E-mail World
    • Managing E-mail with Outlook Express
    • Using Newsgroups
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Workshop
  • Part V: An Evening with Advanced Windows
  • Hour 15. Exploring Your Hardware Interface
  • Hour 16. Understanding Printing and Fonts
  • Hour 17. Using Windows on the Road
  • Hour 18. Giving Windows XP a Tune-Up
  • Hour 19. Managing Your Hard Drives
  • Hour 20. Tinkering with the Advanced System Tools
  • Part VI: Having Fun at Nighttime
  • Hour 21. Using Media Player
  • Hour 22. Picturing Windows XP Graphics
  • Hour 23. Making Movies with Windows XP
  • Hour 24. Advanced Windows XP Tips
  • Part VII: Appendixes
  • Appendix A. Differences Between the Windows Home and Professional Edition
  • Appendix B. Glossary
  • Appendix C. Answers to Quizzes

Using Newsgroups

In a way, a newsgroup acts like a combination of a slow e-mail program and a community bulletin board. Newsgroups have little or nothing to do with the daily news. Newsgroups are thousands of lists, arranged by subject, that hold messages and files that you and others can post and read.

Suppose that you are interested in rollerblading and want to trade information you have with others who are interested in the sport. You could find one of the several newsgroups related to rollerblading and read the hundreds of messages and files posted to that newsgroup. Depending on the Internet service you use and the newsgroup filing rules, you might find messages months old or only from the past few days. Often, the larger newsgroups can keep only a limited number of days'worth of messages and files in the newsgroup.

This is how newsgroups act like slow e-mail services: If someone has posted a question for which you know the answer, you can post a reply. Your reply will be seen by all in the newsgroup who want to read the reply. It is not guaranteed that the person who submitted the question will ever go back to the newsgroup to read the answer, but the postings are for anybody and everybody who is interested.

Each ISP provides access to a different number of the thousands and thousands of newsgroups in existence. To see newsgroups available to your service, click Internet Explorer's Mail button and select Read News. Although your ISP might give you access to thousands of newsgroups, subscribe just to those that interest you. The Internet Explorer Read News button displays the Newsgroups listing dialog box shown in Figure 14.7.

Figure 14.7 Select the newsgroups to which you want to subscribe.

You might see one or more news servers in the left column. Each news server contains a different set of newsgroups. Your ISP determines the number of servers that appear in the news server column. When you click on a server, the list of newsgroups that reside on that server appears in the center of the window.

The newsgroups have strange names, such as rec.pets.dogs and alt.algebra.help. Table 14.1 describes what the more common newsgroup prefixes stand for. Somewhere else in the newsgroup name you can often glean more information about the newsgroup's primary topic; for example, a newsgroup named rec.sport.skating.roller would probably contain skating news, and alt.autos.italian would contain files and messages pertaining to Italian cars. (i macchina l'italiani!)

Table 14.1. Common Newsgroup Prefixes Describe the Nature of the Newsgroup

Scroll through the newsgroup list to find the newsgroups you want to see. When you find one or more newsgroups you want to see, subscribe to those newsgroups by double-clicking on the newsgroup name (or highlight the name and click Subscribe). If you click the Subscribe tab, you see the list of newsgroups to which you've subscribed. Click the OK button to close the Newsgroups window and prepare to read the news.

The following To Do item describes how you would read newsgroup messages and post new messages to the newsgroups. Keep in mind that a message might be a short note or an entire file. As with e-mail, if a news posting contains a file, the file will come as an attachment to the message.

To Do: Reading Newsgroups

1. Start Internet Explorer and sign in to your Internet account.
2. Click the toolbar's Mail button.
3. Select Read News. A list of your subscribed newsgroups appears, as shown in Figure 14.8.

4. To read messages in a newsgroup, double-click that newsgroup name. Figure 14.9 appears showing the newsgroups in the upper window and the text for the selected newsgroup in the lower window. Some long messages take a while to arrive, and you won't see any of the message until the entire message downloads to your PC.

   

   Figure 14.8 Your subscribed newsgroup messages appear when you first request newsgroup access.

   

   Figure 14.9 Scroll through the news message headers and see detail in the lower window.

   If a message has a plus sign next to it, click the plus sign to open all related messages. The messages form a thread, meaning that they are related to each other. If someone posts a question, for example, and several people reply to that posting, all those related messages group under the first question's message, and you can see the replies only after you click the plus sign. The plus sign becomes a minus sign when you expand the newsgroup item so that you can collapse the item again.

5. Check the Size column to determine whether you can read the message in the lower window or whether you should open a new window to view the message. If a message is more than 2 or 3 kilobytes, you should probably double-click the message header to view the message inside a scrollable window. The window contains a menu that enables you to save the message in a file on your disk for later retrieval. If a message has an attachment, you must open the message in a separate window to save the attachment as a file on your disk.

   After you read a message inside the preview pane, you can click another message header to view another message. If you view a message in a separate window, you can close the window to view a different message.

6. If you want to reply to a message, you have two options: reply to the group, in which case everybody who subscribes to the newsgroup can read your reply; or reply to the author privately via e-mail. The Reply Group and Reply toolbar buttons accomplish these purposes. Each copies the original message at the bottom of your reply.

   You don't have to reply to existing messages if you want to start a new message topic. You can also start a new message thread (related postings) by clicking the New Post button and typing a new message. Your message appears in the newsgroup as a new post and not part of a chain of previous postings.

Probably the biggest problem with newsgroups is the time you waste in them! You might hop over to a newsgroup to see whether the group contains an answer you need, and two hours later you're still reading the postings there. Newsgroups can provide a wealth of information on thousands and thousands of topics. Although the Web is great for organizing information into collections of pages, newsgroups are useful for the straight messages and files that people want to share with each other.

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