Hi Liam.
Have you tried power cycling your modem and router, and rebooting your pc?
Do you use a router?
If so, do you get the same problem connecting your pc direct to the modem?
Which newsgroup provider are you getting such slow speeds from?
If you're not using VM's own newsgroups, what speeds do you get from there?
Have you tried multiple file downloads to check your connection speed?
Do 2 simultaneous downloads from the
VM demo games server plus 2 simultaneous downloads of
Zen test files -- that's four file downloads happening at once!
Now add up each of the four download speeds to get your total download rate.