From the time the web took off back in the 1990s until present, once people realized they could share files and talk to each other over the computer they have looked for easy ways to do that.  It started out with text, then pictures, and now music and video are the most common items people are looking to trade and download.

Speed is a problem.  There has always been a fight between the size of the file and the speed of the connection.  Nobody wants to wait five or six hours for a file to download, especially after spending five or six hours to find it in the first place.  Initially on the web, files were available directly from webpages which made it easy.  You saw a link, clicked it and it downloaded to your computer.

Eventually, that changed as the web went all commercial (likely to pay for the bandwidth these large files ate up) and it became harder and harder to find reliable links and sites to download from.  That's about the time that Peer to Peer (P2P) showed up.

While P2P networks had been around long before Napster, Napster opened the eyes of the masses to the possibilities.  Ever since, P2P applications and networks have sprung up, but they have limitations as well.  How many times have you used one of these applications and get crappy download speeds or incomplete files because the person providing it on the other end is limiting how fast they can upload it or shuts down their application before you are done.? Frustrating is the nice way of putting what you are really thinking.

Bittorrent took P2P a step further and generally provides better reliability and speeds -- eventually.  However, you are usually still restricted by share ratios and firewalls which necessarily began popping up all over the place. 

While all of this was going on, Usenet continued on its merry way in the background.  Binary newsgroups continued to warehouse millions of files and if you could figure out how to use a Newsreader, you could eventually get at them.  They are much more user friendly today than in the past, but let's face it.  The average joe computer user doesn't care how a file is delivered, all they want to do is open up Internet Explorer, click on a picture or movie and have it run on their computer.

Well, with Easynews this is now possible, and the limitations of P2P are not present.  The speed of the download depends only on your connection.  You can "leech" as much as you want - there is no share ratio, and you never have to worry about someone cutting off the download before it is finished.  The binaries are stored on the news server and retained there for 30-200 days depending on where you go.

Best of all, Easynews lets you access all of this from your web browser.  As easy as it may be, it still requires a little bit of thinking and that is why Easynews Guide has been developed.  Without question, one can use the Easynews service and eventually figure out how to get a file onto your computer.  However, once there, depending on that file's format, you may or may not know what to do with it.  Easynews Guide will take you step by step through everything from signing up to use Easynews, to finding files, to using them.