Jay Honeck wrote:
I used a newsreader for years (and still could, on my home ISP,
Mediacom cable), but our hotel ISP is Qwest DSL, and they charge extra
for newsgroup access. Since I really can't justify paying extra hotel
money just to surf the newsgroups, I am forced to "get by" with
GoogleGroups.

You don't have to get newsgroup access from your ISP! You can get free
or pay service from anybody you want, and just use whatever connection
you have handy. Specifically, this means that you could pay for
news service out of the "personal" bucket of money and just use the
connection at the hotel to access the pay news server.

If you don't want to spend any money at all, http://www.newzbot.com/
lists several free Usenet servers. Most of the free servers do not
allow posting, but if you just want to read, they work fine.

Matt Roberds