I can access my ISPs news server from university by supplying my user/pass. This is good because I get up to 200KB/s from them.. however the retention is poor and there are often lots of missing parts for binaries.

My alternative is a premium account with clara, which still has pretty poor (albeit better) retention but fewer incomplete binaries. It seems to be capped at 60K/s which is very annoying.

Anyway where does Xnews fit into this? Well, I queued up something (including incomplete sections) into something called a '_Queue' which is a special type of folder, basically the headers are copied across. I then selected the incomplete sections (roughly 4, and on looking only missing one part or so each) and selected 'find missing sections...' the pop-up dialog allows me to select news servers so I choose the claranet one and bingo, a something, 98% of it at 200KB/s, the rest at 60KB/s.

I managed to get a hold of 'the cure - disintegration' after listening to 'fascination street' which locust posted. Fantastic album. I also got Pornography (the cure album that is), not so great, but interesting to hear where the whole goth music thing grew from. Maralyn Manson is such a poser.