Making A Static Homepage

I am running WPv2.5 and I want to make a static homepage. I tried the Filosofo plugin with no luck. It says that for WPv2.1 and up you can go to Options>Reading, and change it there. Well I see no “Options” or “Reading” anywhere on 2.5. What I want to do is, say I have 2 Blog categories (not pages), right now my frontpage shows the most recent post from either both of those categories. Well when people first visit my site, I only want one of the categories posts to be displayed to them. Like, I have a news category and a downloads category – I only want the news category to show up on the main page. I want them to have to click the Downloads category manually to see what I have posted in that. Any help would be much appreciated 🙂