Favorite Files

No favorite files added yet

Recent Posts

1. 
   Review - NewsLeecher

   3.9 Beta 13 (Mar 12, 2008)

   Thirteen(!) betas of new features while known, longstanding bugs remain??? This product needs a major code freeze on new features and a focus on FIXING long standing bugs and issues that have been around for ages. If that were done this could easily become a 5-star app and I'd be the first to give it that rating. As it stands, I cannot recommend this at all and won't be renewing my license beyond this year. It also doesn't help that some of the ridiculous number of beta releases have remained up for months on end with various excuses. Combine that with the 1-year subscription fee to download new betas, er, releases and you have a serious problem.

2. 
   Review - NewsMan Pro

   2.7.0.3 (Aug 7, 2007)

   Nice looking software and the authors do indeed have a quick response time to problems that come up. However, and this is a critical flaw in my opinion, it needs to be said upfront that it *will* choke on high bandwidth news groups unless you severely reduce the retention to only a few days. As long as you are willing to do that, the software is golden. But if you try and go with a full feed retaining all available posts on some of the bigger services like Giganews even with substantial hardware (Core 2 Quad QX6700 with RAID-5 Cheetah 15K.5 [5 drives] in my test case) and dedicated MySQL server settings you will run into problems. In my case the program took almost 3 full days(!) on the initial header pull and post-processing and then 2-3 hours afterwards on the scheduled daily download. Note: the actual download time itself was tiny compared to the time it took the program to process and store the headers. A competing product on the same system using the same groups took approximately 2.5 hours on the initial pull and roughly 10-15 minutes on the daily updates.