Microsoft Newsgroups:
Getting Online Help with Microsoft Products

Revised 4/19/04, Jerry Winegarden, Duke Univ

Newsgroups hosted by Microsoft's private news server (msnews.microsoft.com) are a good source of online help. It's peer-to-peer support, so it's the user community that supports each other, although there are individuals who answer enough questions that Microsoft rewards them by designating them as MVP's (Most Valuable Professional).

There are two ways to access these news groups: with a news reader (e.g. Outlook Express) or a web interface.

Via news reader

Configure your news reader to point to: msnews.microsoft.com

Warning: there are a LARGE number of newsgroups here! Subscribe to the ones that you are interested in. You will most likely be interested in groups like: microsoft.public.windowsupdate.

Via web browser

http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.asp

Newsgroups are listed in the left frame. The "microsoft.public" part of the newgroup names are not displayed here, so newsgroups appear as: "windowsupdate" instead of "microsoft.public.windowsupdate".

Searching archives of newsgroups for answers

Use Google Groups Search to search for answers from Microsoft's and others' newsgroups (e.g. Novell and others).