Newsgroups are Usenet.
Advantages of Torrents:
* Easy to use
* AVI, MKV Files etc are not achived
* Always complete, as long as there's a complete copy in the swarm.
* Files are downloadable for as long as there is a complete copy.
* Free
* 'Scene' and P2P releases.
Disadvantages of Torrents:
* Speed dependant on the speed peers upload to you.
* No seeds/ peers, no downloads.
* Easy to get caught
Advantages of Usenet:
* Fast, easy to max out your connection.
* You have access to all the releases from 200+ days ago, or whatever your servers retention is.
* You won't get caught.
Disadvantages of Usenet:
* Not as easy to use
* Most files are archived
* Archives are often passworded (drives you up the wall).
* Normally requires a pay server
* Many files are incomplete and need repairing using quickpar
* Articles expire
* Often limited to 'scene' releases, i.e no axxo files.
I also use Grabbit as my downloader, and http://www.hitnews.eu/index_en.php as my News Provider. Hitnews do a free 3-day trial if you want to try it out, it's a no-strings trial and they don't require any payment details. They are pretty good, i've used them for over a year now.
You can search for files using sites such as http://www.bintube.com/ http://www.nzbindex.nl/
http://www.newzleech.com/
Software you will need:
Quickpar2 http://www.quickpar.org.uk/
WinRar http://www.rarlab.com/
Grabbit http://www.shemes.com/
Grabbit does have a built in par2 and rar dearchiver, but Grabbit can be buggy. Quickpar2 is a wonderful thing, I also create par2 files for everything I burn to DVDs.
As wcoffery does say, there are many viruses on Usenet, if you download any executable programs (games, applications etc) you need a good virus scanner with upto date virus defintitions. If a virus infected torrent gets uploaded to TBP or Mininova, those sites will remove the torrent once it gets reported. On Usenet people will often comment that it has a virus, but the files still remain and you need a clients like Xnews to read those comments. Xnews will also download binaries, but to those who aren't familar to it, the user interface can come as a shock.
There's also quite a few people who upload small executable files with the same names of any bigish media file, they are easy to avoid because of their file sizes. But you still need to be aware of them.
Some archives are also password, they contains archives within the achive and also contain a link to a website where they say you can get the password. These websites are often 'malware loaded', and are best avoided.
As the years go by, Usenet becomes more and more mainstream which is a problem. The only thing which keeps it under the radar is it's difficulty of use. Clients like Graboid and Usenext, do serious harm to us and also charge a fair bit which is also harmfull.