Downloading (the usenet method) and the Joy owning a mod'd xbox

Have you been struggling to get the newest software, movies, TV shows, games, emulators over a peer to peer network such as Kazaa, Emule, Lime wire, or even using a Bit Torrent tracker to get your fix? Well Stop! Your wasting your time in a serious way. There is something out there unknown to the general public. Its been around since the dawn of the internet and due to its complexity and learning curb, is out of reach of the simpletons on the internet. But we are elite right? That’s why we use Newsgroups. Oh btw, this may not be legal in your area to try this, because we all know your not supposed to get free software, or movies, and games. Also, I would suggest that you only do this for research purposes. But on the other hand, sometimes, your customer has a valid license for some software, movie or game, but they just lost the disk, well here is how you can get them another copy. As a computer tech, you need an edge!

Wait what was that? News groups, ya I have heard of that, but don’t really know what it does or what its for, you might be thinking to your self. Usenet is where its at. To give you some reason to care about this, let me put it to you in practical terms that make sense. Try downloading that new DVD that you have wanted to watch on a peer-to-peer program. How long would it take? 3 or 4 days right? If you could even download the whole thing with out it being corrupted or the wrong thing. On Usenet you would typically get the same DVD in as little as 20 minutes. Lets compare download speeds. On Lime wire, I’m feeling lucky when I’m getting a 40kbps download speed, actually I almost feel guilty. 100kbps YA lets throw a party and start bragging to our friends right?

Now go to Usenet. I start downloading the same DVD and what is my download speed. A whopping 925kpbs compared to 40kpbs. What was I doing on those stupid peer-to-peer programs??? It’s like going from a dialup connection and getting that fat high-speed Internet connection for the first time. WOW. It’s like having ridden a horse like an Amish guy for your whole life and then suddenly be given the keys to a fully loaded Corvette and told to have a great time don’t worry about scratching the paint.

At this point you might be thinking GREAT how do I start downloading like a PIMP. Well, you need to hear the down side. Your gonna have to bust out the wallet and pay 20 bucks a month to be a member of Usenet. Actually your going to need 3 things.

1)A membership to Usenet. Check out Giganews it’s the one I use. www.giganews.com. You get 10 connections, unlimited downloading. Its hot.

2)A membership to www.newzbin.com . This site organizes the jumble of Usenet which is almost impossible to read through and puts it into nice little categories that were all use to. This membership costs about $3 per month. Well worth it. You can also search google for .nzb sources. A few free sites worth noting are nzbsrus.com and newzmonster.com

3)A newsleeching program. I really like newsleacher 1.0. This can be found by your clever tech ways or you can buy it at www.newsleecher.com

4)A Fast FAST FFFAAAASSSSTTT internet connection. Try and score the biggest fastest one you can.

Once you have all this together you are ready to get started. Configure the newsleecher with the giganews account information you received upon signup and set it to be the default app for downloading .nzb files. Now go to newzbin and find something you want. After you sign in, click get message ID’s. It will open up the .nzb file in your newsleecher, and off you go. Downloading at 900k. Now mind you that we have the faster 8 meg / second speed from our cable company. Before we had a 5 Meg download and were getting speeds around 560kb. I decided as a tech, I could justify having the faster internet connection. Believe me its worth it unless you like to wait for everything forever and a day to download.

Wait its 3 days later and you have completely filled up your puny 80 GB hard drive with movies and software in like 3 days. Are you going to start deleting old to get the new?? No way. You need to build yourself a TERABYTE server. How? Easy, get a raid controller that can handle 4 drives. Then go out and buy your self 4 300GB drives. Should only cost about 800 bucks for all this stuff right? But do you know how many movies you can store on 1000GB??? Lets just say that you will have the best movie collection your friends have ever seen… Your typical movie downloaded on Usenet will range from 800 MB to 4 GB depending on the quality your getting. I usually go for the XVID format as it’s a small file size with great quality. But with a TERABITE I’m not too worried about it. But everyone, I have to confess, I’m a little crazy with my hard drive space, I have currently 6 TERABYTES of hard drive space at my disposal. I don’t really see many of you going to that extreme but hey we all have to have our hobbies right?

Now, comes the fun part, watching the movies. How? XBOX, it’s the best media center appliance you could ever get, and for 150 bucks the cheapest too. But of course, Microsoft, has to ruin a good thing and make their XBOX worthless with no features at all. How lame. Check out www.xbox-scene.com to see what that baby can do with out the lame Microsoft software to clog it up. Telling you how to mod your XBOX is beyond the scope of this article, perhaps I’ll write another one specifically for that purpose. Its a fun challenge, basically, you hook you XBOX up to you network. Copy a specially formatted game save into your memory card, copy it to the hard drive, load 007 into your xbox, load the special save game. It will launch a linux console from your xbox. You can then Find the IP address and FTP into it. Then upload the new OS that you got from xbox scene and reboot. Make sure to backup the existing OS by ftp'ing the old files off your xbox and then save them. There are some files you have to aquire before you can upload the new OS. To get this software, you can download MIRC, connect to xbins# channel. You should then be able to get a logon to the FTP site to download the software that you need to upload. Its just about that simple. Did I mention that its really not that simple and takes a little while to figure out? No? well now you know. But trust me, well worth it again. This may be a little much to deal with all at once I know, I have just changed your life for ever you don’t have to thank me.. Anyway, now you know everything about how to download like a PIMP. Use it wisely.