Chewtobacca said:
I might be told off for saying this...

Sad the internet has become such a hostile place, that people feel the need to apologize for asking simple questions. For the most part, OT.com is a bit more mature than that.

For news groups you need two things:

1). News group access (some ISPs include this, you can probably check online to see if yours does. If not, then you have to pay for a premium service. There are plenty of free ones out there, but they will not work for downloading files). Files posted on news groups don't stay up forever, and have to be reposted eventually. So just because something was on newsgroups a year ago, doesn't mean it is still there now. If you have poor retention, then something posted just a month or so ago may be unattainable to you. Retention and download limits are something to keep in mind when signing up for a service. For example, a 90 day retention means you can only download files that are no more than 90 days old, and obviously download limit means you can only download that much data in a specified period of time. For example, 10GB per month would mean once you download 10GB you cannot pull down any more until the next month.

2). A program for reading the new groups, or for managing the download of the files. NZB-O-Matic is a pretty good one for a beginner.

I have no doubt a quick google search will find you some pretty easy to read step-by-step guides for setting up newgroup access on a program like NZB-o-Matic.