Re: Good Windows newsreader?

"Pete Stephenson" <pete+usenet [at] heypete.com> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Anyone have any idea for a good Windows newsreader? I presently use
> MT-NewsWatcher on the Mac, and am wondering what good ones exist for
> Windows.
>
> It'd be preferable if it were free, of course.

I use Hamster Playground and Outlook Express. Hamster Playground does the
caching and filtering of the usenet posts, and OE just displays them. I
also use OE's ability to highlight certain posts to quickly find posts of
interest.

It's free, you can filter on anything you want, and it works well enough
for my purposes.

I've completely blocked OE from being able to access the internet (it
connects to Hamster Playground on 127.0.0.1), and I've reduced OE's and
Hamster Playground's system permissions so they're running in a
non-administrator context. So, not only does it fulfill my functionality
requirements, it's safer than using OE alone.

The good thing about Hamster Playground is that you can use different
newsreaders with it... if you don't like OE, just switch to another
newsreader... but the filtering you've set up in Hamster Playground
remains the same... no need to set up filtering in each different
newsreader.

Hamster Playground works with usenet pretty well... you can also use it
for email, although I've never explored that part of it.