While it is almost certain that your Internet Service Provider will offer a news feed that will carry the Microsoft newsgroups, to ensure you have the latest and fullest access to these newsgroups, it is advisable to subscribe (free) to the Microsoft News Server. Most newsreaders provide the facility to access more than one news server, but this page concerns setting up that access with Outlook Express.

If you use Outlook (or another e-mail application) then you can setup Outlook Express to display only its news reading section, by changing the Shortcut switch. Right click the shortcut - and select 'Properties'. Under the 'General' tab, ensure that the 'Read Only' attribute is unchecked. Under 'Shortcut', add the following switch to the command line "/outnews". See illustration:

Start Outlook Express and from the opening page, select the wizard to ' Set up a Newsgroups account...'

Follow the prompts and provide the information as required:

If you apply your true e-mail address here, you are likely to be bombarded with spam, much of it laden with viruses and purporting to come from Microsoft. Microsoft does not post unsolicited e-mails.

You can insert a false e-mail address, as illustrated,  which may help avoid the attentions of the spammers, but will make it difficult for news group contributors to contact you directly .... which may be an advantage.

Use of a non-standard e-mail address format will throw a warning message, but you can ignore that.

It is important that the NNTP server address, in the above screen, is entered exactly as shown.

That's all there is to it!  You can now access the server and download the newsgroup headings. Note that as the newsgroups are Microsoft dedicated, only Microsoft topics are available, thus the list will be considerably smaller than that provided by your ISP's server.