Jim Karpen Tips

January 2001

I'm now writing professionally about the Pocket PC, which is a great gadget--and which would have had me completely befuddled on occasion if it hadn't been for the Pocket PC discussion group. Here I am to implore you: if you haven't yet tried the Usenet discussion groups, called "newsgroups," please do. And I promise, this is the last time I'll beg.

Whenever I have a technical question, I post it to the newsgroup named microsoft.public.pocketpc. This is a large and enthusiastic community, with hundreds of messages posted every day. If I ask a question, any number of experts seem to be standing by eager to answer it. There are scores of thousands of discussions on every topic you can think of, from wine making to computers to chess. In fact, I just checked and there are over 50 discussion groups devoted to chess alone.

Very few people I know have used the newsgroups because, simply, they aren't found on the web. It's true that you can access them via Deja, but using a "newsreader" is a superior way of interacting with them.

If you use Outlook Express, the newsreader is built into it, and using the newsgroups is as simple as using e-mail. To begin using the newsgroups, you must have access to a "news server," which every Internet provider makes available. You need to find out from your provider the address of the news server so that you can enter it into your settings.

For example, one of the providers in eastern Iowa, Lisco, has a news server available at this address: news.lisco.com. If you're using Outlook Express, then you enter that name into the Accounts selection under the Tools menu. In the dialog box, you click on the News tab and then enter news.lisco.com.

Once you've done that, an icon should show up in your list of e-mail folders down at the bottom. Click on it, and it will likely ask you if you want to download the names of all the newsgroups. Since there are at least 60,000, this will take a while. If it doesn't ask you to do that, then download them by selecting "Get Complete Newsgroup" list in the View menu.

Once you have the list downloaded, go to the window at the top right that says, "Display newsgroups containing." Type "chess" here or whatever your interest, and it will show you a list of all the groups on that topic. Then you simply click on one, and it will display a list of messages almost exactly like a list of e-mail messages. You read and reply to them like you would do with your e-mail.

Some of these discussions have high volume, and using features of your newsreader such as "threaded" discussion will make them manageable.

© 2001 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D. (#248)