15-4-00
Changes in 0.99c - fixed a dead link to AutoAgent
Forte's Agent, and it's freebie sibling, Free Agent, are arguably the best newsreaders available for Windows. They can also be set-up so that you can work off-line and only logon to exchange messages, thus saving 75% of your connect time The only problem with this is that you still need to be present to launch the program and push a few buttons, and getting through at peak time to many ISP's is nearly impossible. Quite why Forte never put a scheduler or at least a command line parameter to automate the program and finish the job off I don't know...
Fortunately, there are several solutions. Most of these require that Winsock or it's equivalent start and stop on demand so that the computer automatically goes on-line for the exchange and logs off when it is finished (this page may help W95 users). The details of how to set this up are available from the FAQ page at Forte . Windows95 users will probably have to upgrade to Agent32 to be able to do this effectively and reliably, as 16 bit versions of Agent cannot initiate the W95 dial up networking. Alternatively, Clockman has an "automation Agent" to do the job. You will also probably have to set up a script (that enters your password and username when logging in) - ask your ISP for this as they should have a script already and be able to walk you through any changes you have to do.
I strongly recommend that Agent users check out the Agent utilities site and the Modified Agent FAQ. If you have trouble with disconnections or large downloads, get one of the utilities like WatchAgent or Agent Task Monitor from the utilites site, which will redial and continue to grab new headers and bodies.
Agent specific schedulers
There are some specific programs for scheduling Agent
AutoAgent is the best of them and works well. Worth a look.
There are several programs that can launch applications at a pre-set time, but few can send the key strokes needed to activate the menus in Agent, and possibly launching Winsock and dialling up before Agent starts.Here are a some which can be used for this function.
Clockman Available in Windows 3.1 and 95 flavours. It has some "ready to go" assistants to help you automate your programs, including Agent and Norton Utilities, and it is also one of the few options for NT / NT4.0 users. It is a commercial-quality shareware program and costs $79.95US, and there is also a shareware 16 bit version. I have used ClockMan95 with it's Agent "Automation assistant" and it works well and took me around 5 minutes to get online. It is also a fully featured programming macro language (which you don't need to know if all you want to do is run Agent) and can do a lot of things. Non programmers should steer clear of the instruction book - it will scare you... .Prabably a bit of an overkill if all you want to do is run Agent, but if you need to automate backups, etc as well then it is worth a look.
But I want to use the Net as well...
I have some web pages I read often, and I want to get a daily update on them. I use NetAttache in conjunction with Seans Scheduler (see above) to retrieve them for me. There are other web crawlers in the offline section of Windows95.com. or at most other FTP repositories.
One advantage of these macro programs is that they can close and restart fax programs if you use your computer as a fax machine like me. There are other alternatives, which are worth having a look at just for using with communication programs such as Procom or 16 bit comms programs that don't share the comm port with fax programs.
A couple for Winfax include:
WfListen disables and re-enables WinFax auto receive (AR). WfListen will silently disable AR, launch your program, wait for it to finish, and re-enable AR. Author is Prodigy Computing in South Africa. (Keating@acm.org)
Logical Business Systems can be contacted through the Logical Business Systems home page.
Geoffrey Merryweather